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THE / & 

PHILOSOPHY 



ov 



THE PLAYS OF SHAKSPERE 

UNFOLDED. 



By DELIA v BACON. 



WITH 

A PREFACE 

liY 

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, 

AUTHOR OF ' THE SCARLET LETTER,' ETC. 



Aphorisms representing a knowledge broken do invite men to 
inquire further. Lord Bacon. 

You find not the apostrophes, aud so niiss the accent. 

Love's Labour's Lost. 
Untie the spell — Prospero. 



BOSTON : 

TJCKNOE AND FIELDS. 

1857. 



TK 2 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1857, by 

DELIA BACON, 

in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



-• — 



PAGE. 

PREFACE iv 

INTRODUCTION. 

CHAP. 

I. The Proposition xvii 

II. The Age of Elizabeth, and the Elizabethan Men of 

Letters sxvii 

III. Extracts from the Life of Ealeigh. — Raleigh's School. . li 

IV. Raleigh's School, continued. — The New Academy . 



BOOK I.* 

THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF DELIVERY AND TRADITION. 

PART I. 

MICHAEL DE MONTAIGNE'S 'PRIVATE AND RETIRED ARTS.' 

I. Ascent from Particulars to the ' Highest Parts of Sciences' 

by the Enigmatic Method illustrated i 

II. Further Illustration of ' Particular Methods of Tradition.' — 

Embarrassments of Literary Statesmen . . .30 
III. The Possibility of great anonymous Works, — or Works 
published under an assumed name, — conveying under 
rhetorical Disguises the Principal Sciences, — re-suggested 
and illustrated 46 



* The Historical Key to the Elizabethan Art of Tradition, which 
formed the First Book of this Work as it was originally prepared for 
the Press, is reserved for separate publication. 



IV CONTENTS. 



PART II. 



THE BACONIAN RHETORIC, OR THE METHOD OF PROGRESSION. 

CHAP. PAGE. 

I. The ' Beginners.' — [' Particular Methods of Tradition.' — 

The Double Method of 'Illustration ' and 'Concealment '] 63 
II. Index to the ' Illustrated' and ' Concealed Tradition' of 
the Principal and Supreme Sciences. — The Science of 
Policy 92 

III. The Science of Morality. § 1. The Exemplar of Good . 100 

IV. „ „ „ § II. The Husbandry thereunto, 

or the Cure and Culture of 
the Mind. — Application . 121 

V. „ „ „ Alteration . 143 

VI. Method of Conveying the Wisdom of the Moderns . .158 



BOOK II. 

ELIZABETHAN ' SECRETS OP MORALITY AND POLICY' ; OR, 
HIE FABLES OF THE NEW LEARNING. 

INTRODUCTORY. 

1. The Design 173 

II. The Missing Books of the Great Instauration or 'Philosophy 

itself 178 



PART I. 
LEAR'S PHILOSOPHER ; 



[OR, THE LAW OF THE ' SPECIAL AND RESPECTIVE DUTIES,' DEFINED AND 

\ 'ILLUSTRATED 'IN TABLES OF 'PRESENCE' AND 'ABSENCE.'] 

I. Philosophy in the Palace ... ... 192 

II. Unaccommodated Man 205 

III. The King and the Beggar 228 

IV. The Use of Eyes 240 

V. The Statesman's Note-Book — and the Play . . . .262 



CONTENTS. V 

PART II. 
JULIUS CAESAR AND CORIOLANUS. 

THE SCIENTIFIC CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL; 

OK, 

' THE COMMON DUTY OF EVERY MAN AS A MAN, OR MEMBER OF A 
STATE,' DEFINED AND ILLUSTRATED IN 'NEGATIVE INSTANCES' 
AND 'INSTANCES OF PRESENCE.' 

JULIUS CAESAR; 

OR, THE EMPIRICAL TREATMENT IN DISEASES OF THE COMMON-WEAL 

EXAMINED. 

CHAP. PAGE 

I. The Death of Tyranny ; or, the Question of the Prerogative 308 
II. Caesar's Spirit .326 

CORIOLANUS. 



THE QUESTION OF THE CONSULSHIP; OR, THE SCIENTIFIC CURE OF THE 
COMMON-WEAL PROPOUNDED. 



I. 

II. 
III. 

IV. 

V. 

VI. 

VII. 

VIII. 

LX. 

X. 

XL 

XII. 

XIII. 



The Elizabethan Heroism 

Criticism of the Martial Government 

' Insurrections Arguing ' 

Political Retrospect . 

The Popular Election 

The Scientific Method in Politics 

Volumnia and her Boy 

M etaphysical Aid 

The Cure. — Plan of Innovation. — New Den 



The Ignorant Election revoked.- 
Conclusion .... 



aitions 
New Constructions 

'The Initiative 
A 'Wrestling; Instance' 



333 

35^ 
360 

372 
389 
410 
427 
454 
473 
497 
512 

535 
561 



PREFACE. 



rpHIS Volume contains the argument, drawn from the Plays 
usually attributed to Shakspere, in support of a theory 
which the author of it has demonstrated by historical evidences 
in another work. Having never read this historical demonstra- 
tion (which remains still in manuscript, with the exception of 
a preliminary chapter, published long ago in an American 
periodical)^ I deem it necessary to cite the author's own ac- 
count of it: — 

' The Historical Part of this work (which was originally the 
principal part, and designed to furnish the historical key to 
the great Elizabethan writings), though now for a long time 
completed and ready for the press, and though repeated refer- 
ence is made to it in this volume, is, for the most part, omitted 
here. It contains a true and before unwritten history, and 
it will yet, perhaps, be published as it stands; but the vivid 
and accumulating historic detail, with which more recent 
research tends to enrich the earlier statement, and disclosures 
which no invention could anticipate, are waiting now to be 
subjoined to it. 

' The internal evidence of the assumptions made at the 
outset is that which is chiefly relied on in the work now first 
presented on this subject to the public. The demonstration 
will be found complete on that ground ; and on that ground 
alone the author is willing, and deliberately prefers, for the 
present, to rest it. 



Vlll PREFACE. 

'External evidence, of course, will not "be wanting; there 
will be enough and to spare, if the demonstration here be 
correct. But the author of the discovery was not willing to 
rob the world of this great question; but wished rather to 
share with it the benefit which the true solution of the 
Problem offers — the solution prescribed by those who pro- 
pounded it to the future. It seemed better to save to the 
world the power and beauty of this demonstration, its intel- 
lectual stimulus, its demand on the judgment. It seemed 
better, that the world should acquire it also in the form of criti- 
cism, instead of being stupified and overpowered with the mere 
force of an irresistible, external, historical proof. Persons in- 
capable of appreciating any other kind of proof, — those who 
are capable of nothing that does not ' directly fall under and 
strike the senses/ as Lord Bacon expresses it, — will have their 
time also; but it was proposed to present the subject first to 
minds of another order.' 

In the present volume, accordingly, the author applies 
herself to the demonstration and development of a system of 
philosophy, which has presented itself to her as underlying 
the superficial and ostensible text of Shakspere's plays. Traces 
of the same philosophy, too, she conceives herself to have 
found in the acknowledged works of Lord Bacon, and in those 
of other writers contemporary with him. All agree in one 
system ; all these traces indicate a common understanding and 
unity of purpose in men among whom no brotherhood has 
hitherto been suspected, except as representatives of a grand 
and brilliant age, when the human intellect made a marked 
step in advance. 

The author did not (as her own consciousness assures her) 
either construct or originally seek this new philosophy. In 
many respects, if I have rightly understood her, it was at 
variance with her pre-conceived opinions, whether ethical, 
religious, or political. She had been for years a student 



PREFACE. IX 

of Shakspere, looking for nothing in his plays beyond what 
the world has agreed to find in them, when she began to see, 
under the surface, the gleam of this hidden treasure. It was 
carefully hidden, indeed, yet not less carefully indicated, as 
with a pointed finger, by such marks and references as could 
not ultimately escape the notice of a subsequent age, which 
should be capable of profiting by the rich inheritance. So, 
too, in regard to Lord Bacon. The author of this volume 
had not sought to put any but the ordinary and obvious inter- 
pretation upon his works, nor to take any other view of his 
character than what accorded with the unanimous judgment 
upon it of all the generations since his epoch. But, as she 
penetrated more and more deeply iiito the plays, and became 
aware of those inner readings, she found fier&elf compelled to 
turn back to the 'Advancement of Learning' for informal on as 
to th eir plan and purport; and Lord Bacon's Treatise failed 
not to give her what she sought ; thus adding to the immortal 
dramas, in her idea, a far higher value than their warmest ad- 
mirers had heretofore claimed for them. They filled out the 
scientific scheme which Bacon had planned, and which needed 
only these profound and vivid illustrations of human life and 
character to make it perfect. Finally, the author's researches 
led her to a point where she found the plays claimed for Lord 
Bacon and his associates, — not in a way that was meant to be 
intelligible in their own perilous times, — but in characters 
that only became legible, and illuminated, as it were, in the 
light of a subsequent period. r 

The reader will soon perceive that the new philosophy, 
as here demonstrated, was of a kind that no professor could 
have ventured openly to teach in the days of Elizabeth 
and James. The concluding chapter of the present work 
makes a powerful statement of the position which a man, 
conscious of great and noble aims, would then have occupied; 
and shows, too, how familiar the age was with all methods 



X PliEFACE. 

of secret communication, and of hiding thought beneath a 
masque of conceit or folly. Applicably to this subject, I 
quote a paragraph from a manuscript of the author's, not in- 
tended for present publication : — 

' It was a time when authors, who treated of a scientific 
politics and of a scientific ethics internally connected with it, 
naturally preferred this more philosophic, symbolic method of 
indicating their connection with their writings, which would 
limit the indication to those who could pierce within the veil of 
a philosophic symbolism. It was the time when the cipher, in 
which one could write ' omnia per omnia,' was in such request, 
and when c wheel ciphers' and ' doubles' were thought not un- 
worthy of philosophic notice. It was a time, too, when the 
phonographic art v/as cultivated, and put to other uses than at 
present, and when a ' nom de plume ' was required for other 
purposes than to serve as the refuge of an author's modesty, 
or vanity, or caprice. It was a time when puns, and charades, 
and enigmas, and anagrams, and monograms, and ciphers, and 
puzzles, were not good for sport and child's play merely; when 
they had need to be close; when they had need to be solvable, 
at least, only to those who should solve them. It was a time 
when all the latent capacities of the English language were 
put in requisition, and it was flashing and crackling, through 
all its lengths and breadths, with puns and quips, and conceits, 
and jokes, and satires, and inlined with philosophic secrets that 
opened down ' into the bottom of a torub' — that opened into 
the Tower — that opened on the scaffold and the block.' 

I quote, likewise, another passage, because I think the 
reader will see in it the noble earnestness of the author's cha- 
racter, and may partly imagine the sacrifices which this 
research has cost her : — 

' The great secret of the Elizabethan age did not lie where 
any superficial research could ever have discovered it. It was 
not left within the range of any accidental disclosure. It did 



PREFACE. XI 

not lie on the surface of any Elizabethan document. The most 
diligent explorers of these documents, in two centuries and a 
quarter, had not found it. No faintest suspicion of it had ever 
crossed the mind of the most recent, and clear-sighted, and 
able investigator of the Baconian remains. It was buried in the 
lowest depths of the lowest deeps of the deep Elizabethan Art; 
that Art which no plummet, till now, has ever sounded. It 
was locked with its utmost reach of traditionary cunning. It 
was buried in the inmost recesses of the esoteric Elizabethan 
learning. It was tied with a knot that had passed the scrutiny 
and baffled the sword of an old, suspicious, dying, military 
government — a knot that none could cut — a knot that must 
be untied. 

' The great secret of the Elizabethan Age was inextricably 
reserved by the founders of a new learning, the prophetic and 
more nobly gifted minds of a new and nobler race of men, for 
a research that should test the mind of the discoverer, and frame 
and subordinate it to that so sleepless and indomitable pur- 
pose of the prophetic aspiration. It was ' the device ' by which 
they undertook to live again in the ages in which their achieve- 
ments and triumphs were forecast, and to come forth and rule 
again, not in one mind, not in the few, not in the many, but in 
all. ' For there is no throne like that throne in the thoughts of 
men,' which the ambition of these men climbed and compassed. 

' The principal works of the Elizabethan Philosophy, those 
in which the new method of learning was practically applied to 
the noblest subjects, were presented to the world in the form 
of AN enigma. It was a^form well fitted to divert inquiry, 
and baffle even the research of the scholar for a time ; but one 
calculated to provoke the philosophic curiosity, and one which 
would inevitably command a research that could end only 
with the true solution. That solution was reserved for 
one who would recognise, at last, in the disguise of the 
great impersonal teacher, the disguise of a new learning. It 



Xll PREFACE. 

waited for the reader who would observe, at last, those thick- 
strewn scientific clues, those thick-crowding enigmas, those 
perpetual beckonings from the ' theatre' into the judicial palace 
of the mind. It was reserved for the student who would recog- 
nise, at last, the mind that was seeking so perseveringly to 
whisper its tale of outrage, and ' the secrets it was forbid/ It 
waited for one who would answer, at last, that philosophic 
challenge, and say, 'Go on, 1 5 11 follow thee !' It was reserved 
for one who would count years as days, for the love of the 
truth it hid ; who would never turn back on the long road of 
initiation, though all f the idols ' must be left behind in its 
stages ; who would never stop until it stopped in that new cave 
of Apollo, where the handwriting on the wall spells anew the 
old Delphic motto, and publishes the word that ' unties the 
spell' 

On this object, which she conceives so loftily, the author 
has bestowed the solitary and self-sustained toil of many years. 
The volume now before the reader, together with the histori- 
cal demonstration which it pre-supposes, is the product of 
a most faithful and conscientious labour, and a truly heroic 
devotion of intellect and heart. No man or woman has ever 
thought or written more sincerely than the author of this 
book. She has given nothing less than her life to the work. 
And, as if for the greater trial of her constancy, her theory 
was divulged, some time ago, in so partial and unsatisfactory 
a manner — with so exceedingly imperfect a statement of its 
claims. — as to put her at great disadvantage before the 
world. A single article from her pen, purporting to be the 
first of a series, appeared in an American Magazine; but unex- 
pected obstacles prevented the further publication in that form, 
after enough had been done to assail the prejudices of the 
public, but far too little to gain its sympathy. Another evil 
followed. An English writer (in a ' Letter to the Earl of 
Ellesmere,' published within a few months past) has thought 



PREFACE. xiii 

it not inconsistent with the fair-play, on which his country 
prides itself, to take to himself this lady's theory, and favour 
the public with it as his own original conception, without 
allusion to the author's prior claim. In reference to this 
pamphlet, she generously says : — 

1 This has not been a selfish enterprise. It is not a personal 
concern. It is a discovery which belongs not to an individual, 
and not to a people. Its fields are wide enough and rich 
enough for us all; and he that has no work, and whoso will, 
let him come and labour in them. The field is the world's ; 
and the world's work henceforth is in it. So that it be known 
in its real comprehension, in its true relations to the weal of 
the world, what matters it? So that the truth, which is dearer 
than all the rest — which abides with us when all others leave 
us, dearest then — so that the truth, which is neither yours 
nor mine, but yours and mine, be known, loved, honoured, 
emancipated, mitred, crowned, adored — who loses anything, 
that does not find it.' ' And what matters it,' says the 
philosophic wisdom, speaking in the abstract, ' what name 
it is proclaimed in, and what letters of the alphabet we 
know it by ? — what matter is it, so that they spell the name 
that is good for all, and good for each,'' — for that is the 
real name here? 

Speaking on the author's behalf, however, I am not entitled 
to imitate her magnanimity; and, therefore, hope that the 
writer of the pamphlet will disclaim any purpose of assuming 
to himself, on the ground of a slight and superficial perform- 
ance, the result which she has attained at the cost of many 
toils and sacrifices. 

And now, at length, after many delays and discourage- 
ments, the work comes forth. It had been the author's 
original purpose to publish it in America; for she wished 
her own country to have the glory of solving the enigma 
of those mighty dramas, and thus adding a new and higher 



XIV PREFACE. 

value to the loftiest productions of the English mind. It 
seemed to her most fit and desirable, that America — having 
received so much from England, and returned so little — should 
do what remained to be done towards rendering this great 
legacy available, as its authors meant it to be, to all future 
time. Thig purpose was frustrated; and it will be seen in 
what spirit she acquiesces. 

' The author was forced to bring it back, and contribute it 
to the literature of the country from which it was derived, 
and to which it essentially and inseparably belongs. It was 
written, every word of it, on English ground, in the midst of 
the old familiar scenes and household names, that even in our 
nursery songs revive the dear ancestral memories; those ' royal 
pursuivants' with which our mother-land still follows and re- 
takes her own. It was written in the land of our old kings and 
queens, and in the land of our own philosophers and POETS 
also. It was written on the spot where the works it unlocks 
were written, and in the perpetual presence of the English 
mind ; the mind that spoke before in the cultured few, and that 
speaks to-day in the cultured many. And it is now at last, 
after so long a time — after all, as it should be — the English 
press that prints it. It is the scientific English press, with 
those old gags (wherewith our kings and queens sought to stop 
it, ere they knew what it was) champed asunder, ground to 
powder, and with its last Elizabethan shackle shaken off, that 
restores, ' in a better hour/ the torn and garbled science com- 
mitted to it, and gives back ' the bread cast on its sure 
waters/ 

There remains little more for me to say. I am not the 
editor of this work; nor can I consider myself fairly entitled 
to the honor (which, if I deserved it, I should feel to be a very 
high as well as a perilous one) of seeing my name associated 
with the author's on the title-page. My object has been 
merely to speak a few words, which might, perhaps, serve the 



PREFACE. XV 

purpose of placing my countrywoman upon a ground of 
amicable understanding with the public. She has a vast pre- 
liminary difficulty to encounter. The first feeling of every 
reader must be one of absolute repugnance towards a person 
who seeks to tear out of the Anglo-Saxon heart the name 
which for ages it has held dearest, and to substitute another 
name, or names, to which the settled belief of the world has 
long assigned a very different position. What I claim for 
this work is, that the ability employed in its composition has 
been worthy of its great subject, and well employed for our 
intellectual interests, whatever judgment the public may pass 
upon the questions discussed. And, after listening to the 
author's interpretation of the Plays, and seeing how wide a 
scope she assigns to them, how high a purpose, and what 
richness of inner meaning, the thoughtful reader will hardly 
return again — not wholly, at all events — to the common view 
of them and of their author. It is for the public to say 
whether my countrywoman has proved her theory. In the 
worst event, if she has failed, her failure will be more 
honorable than most people's triumphs ; since it must fling 
upon the old tombstone, at Stratford-on-Avon, the noblest 
tributary wreath that has ever lain there. 

Nathaniel Hawthorne. 






THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE PLAYS 
OF SHAKSPERE. 



INTRODUCTION. 
CHAPTER I. 

THE PROPOSITION. 

' One time will owe another.' — Coriolanus. 

fpHIS work is designed to propose to the consideration, not 
-*- of the learned world only, but of all ingenuous and prac- 
tical minds, a new development of that system of practical 
philosophy from which THE SCIENTIFIC ARTS of the Modern 
Ages proceed, and which has already become, just to the ex- 
tent to which it has been hitherto opened, the wisdom, — the 
universally approved, and practically adopted, Wisdom of the 
Moderns. 

It is a development of this philosophy, which was de- 
liberately postponed by the great Scientific Discoverers and 
Reformers, in whose Scientific Discoveries and Reformations 
our organised advancements in speculation and practice have 
their origin; — Reformers, whose scientific acquaintance with 
historic laws forbade the idea of any immediate and sudden 
cures of the political and social evils which their science 
searches to the root, and which it was designed to eradicate. 

The proposition to be demonstrated in the ensuing pages is 
this: That the new philosophy which strikes out from the 
Court — from the Court of that despotism that names and 
gives form to the Modern Learning, — which comes to us 

b 



Xviil INTRODUCTION. 

from the Court of the last of the Tudors and the first of the 
Stuarts, — that new philosophy which we have received, and 
accepted, and adopted as a practical philosophy, not merely in 
that grave department of learning in which it comes to us 
professionally as philosophy, but in that not less important 
department of learning in which it comes to us in the disguise 
of amusement, — in the form of fable and allegory and para- 
ble, — the proposition is, that this Elizabethan philosophy is, 
in these two forms of it, — not two philosophies, — not two 
Elizabethan philosophies, not two new and wondrous phi- 
losophies of nature and practice, not two new Inductive 
philosophies, but one, — one and the same : that it is philosophy 
in both these forms, with its veil of allegory and parable, and 
without it; that it is philosophy applied to much more im- 
portant subjects in the disguise of the parable, than it is in 
the open statement; that it is philosophy in both these cases, 
and not philosophy in one of them, and a brutish, low-lived, 
illiterate, unconscious spontaneity in the other. 

The proposition is that it proceeds, in both cases, from a 
reflective deliberative, eminently deliberative, eminently con- 
scious, designing mind; and that the coincidence which is 
manifest not in the design only, and in the structure, but in the 
detail to the minutest points of execution, is not accidental. 

It is a proposition which is demonstrated in this volume by 
means of evidence derived principally from the books of this 
philosophy — books in which the safe delivery and tradition 
of it to the future was artistically contrived and triumphantly 
achieved: — the books of a new ' school' in philosophy; books 
in which the connection with the school is not always openly 
asserted; books in which the true names of the authors are 
not always found on the title-page; — the books of a school, too, 
which was compelled to have recourse to translations in some 
cases, for the safe delivery and tradition of its new learning. 

The facts which lie on the surface of this question, which 
are involved in the bare statement of it, are sufficient of them- 
selves to justify and command this inquiry. 

The fact that these two great branches of the philosophy 



THE PROPOSITION. XIX 

of observation and practice, both already virtually recognised 
as that, — the one openly subordinating the physical forces of 
nature to the wants of man, changing the face of the earth 
under our eyes, leaving behind it, with its new magic, the 
miracles of Oriental dreams and fables; — the other, under its 
veil of wildness and spontaneity, under its thick-woven veil 
of mirth and beauty, with its inducted precepts and dispersed 
directions, insinuating itself into all our practice, winding 
itself into every department of human affairs; speaking from 
the legislator's lips, at the bar, from the pulpit, — putting in its 
word every where, always at hand, always sufficient, con- 
stituting itself, in virtue of its own irresistible claims and in 
the face of what we are told of it, the oracle, the great prac- 
tical, mysterious, but universally acknowledged, oracle of our 
modern life; the fact that these two great branches of the 
modern philosophy make their appearance in history at the 
same moment, that they make their appearance in the same 
company of men — in that same little courtly company of 
Elizabethan Wits and Men of Letters that the revival of the 
ancient learning brought out here — this is the fact that strikes 
the e}^ at the first glance at this inquiry. 

But that this is none other than that same little clique of 
disappointed and defeated politicians who undertook to head 
and organize a popular opposition against the government, 
and were compelled to retreat from that enterprise, the best of 
of them effecting their retreat with some difficulty, others 
failing entirely to accomplish it, is the next notable fact which 
the surface of the inquiry exhibits. That these two so illus- 
trious branches of the modern learning were produced for the 
ostensible purpose of illustrating and adorning the tyrannies 
. which the men, under whose countenance and protection they 
are produced, were vainly attempting, or had vainly attempted 
to set bounds to or overthrow, is a fact which might seem of 
itself to suggest inquiry. When insurrections are suppressed, 
when ' the monstrous enterprises of rebellious subjects are 
overthrown, then FAME, who is the posthumous sister of the 
giants, — the sister of defeated giants springs up'; so a man 

b2 



XX INTRODUCTION. 

who had made some political experiments himself that were 
not very successful, tells us. 

The fact that the men under whose patronage and in whose 
service ' Will the Jester ' first showed himself, were men 
who were secretly endeavouring to make political capital of 
that new and immense motive power, that not yet available, 
and not very easily organised political power which was 
already beginning to move the masses here then, and already 
threatening, to the observant eye, with its portentous move- 
ment, the foundations of tyranny, the fact, too, that these men 
were understood to have made use of the stage unsuccessfully 
as a means of immediate political effect, are facts which lie on 
the surface of the history of these works, and unimportant as 
it may seem to the superficial enquirer, it will be found to be 
anything but irrelevant as this inquiry proceeds. The man 
who is said to have contributed a thousand pounds towards 
the purchase of the theatre and wardrobe and machinery, in 
which these philosophical plays were first exhibited, was 
obliged to stay away from the first appearance of Hamlet, in the 
perfected excellence of the poetic philosophic design, in con- 
sequence of being immured in the Tower at that time for an 
attempt to overthrow the government. This was the ostensi- 
ble patron and friend of the Poet; the partner of his treason 
was the ostensible friend and patron of the Philosopher. So 
nearly did these philosophic minds, that were ' not for an age 
but for all time,' approach each other in this point. But the 
protege and friend and well-nigh adoring admirer of the Poet, 
was also the protege and friend and well-nigh adoring admirer 
of the Philosopher. The fact that these two philosophies, in 
this so close juxta-position, always in contact, playing always 
into each other's hands, never once heard of each other, know 
nothing of each other, is a fact which would seem at the first 
blush to point to the secret of these ' Know-Nothings,' who 
are men of science in an age of popular ignorance, and there- 
fore have a 'secret'; who are men of science in an age in 
which the questions of science are * forbidden questions,' and 
are therefore of necessity ( Know-Nothings.' 



THE PROPOSITION. XXI 

As to Ben Jonson, and the evidence of his avowed ad- 
miration for the author of these plays, from the point of 
view here taken, it is sufficient to say in passing, that this 
man, whose natural abilities sufficed to raise him from a 
position hardly less mean and obscure than that of his great 
rival, was so fortunate as to attract the attention of some of 
the most illustrious personages of that time ; men whose obser- 
vation of natures was quickened by their necessities ; men who 
were compelled to employ ' living instruments ' in the accom- 
plishment of their designs; who were skilful in detecting the 
qualities they had need of, and skilful in adapting means to 
ends. This dramatist's connection with the stage of course 
belongs to this history. His connection with the author of 
these Plays, and with the player himself, are points not to be 
overlooked. But the literary history of this age is not yet 
fully developed. It is enough to say here, that he chanced 
to be honored with the patronage of three of the most illus- 
trious personages of the age in which he lived. He had three 
patrons. One was Sir Walter Ealeigh, in whose service he 
was; one was the Lord Bacon, whose well nigh idolatrous 
admirer he appears also to have been ; the other was Shakspere, 
to whose favor he appears to have owed so much. With 
his passionate admiration of these last two, stopping only 
' this side of idolatry ' in his admiration for them both, and 
being under such deep personal obligations to them both, 
why could he not have mentioned some day to the author of 
the Advancement of Learning, the author of Hamlet — Hamlet 
who also e lacked advancement?' What more natural than to 
suppose that these two philosophers, these men of a learning 
so exactly equal, might have some sympathy with each other, 
might like to meet each other. Till he has answered that 
question, any evidence which he may have to produce in 
apparent opposition to the conclusions here stated will not 
be of the least value. 

These are questions which any one might properly ask, who 
had only glanced at the most superficial or easily accessible facts 
in this case, and without any evidence from any other source to 



XXll INTRODUCTION. 

stimulate the inquiry. These are facts which lie on the surface 
of this history, which obtrude themselves on our notice, and 
demand inquiry. 

That which lies immediately below this surface, accessible 
to any research worthy of the name is, that these two so new 
extraordinary developments of the modern philosophy which 
come to us without any superficially avowed connexion, which 
come to us as branches of learning merely, do in fact meet and 
unite in one stem, f which has a quality of entireness and 
continuance throughout/ even to the most delicate fibre of 
them both, even to the ' roots' of their trunk, ' and the strings 
of those roots/ which trunk lies below the surface of that age, 
buried, carefully buried, for reasons assigned; and that it is 
the sap of this concealed trunk, this new trunk of sciences, 
which makes both these branches so vigorous, which makes 
the flowers and the fruit both so fine, and so unlike anything 
that we have had from any other source in the way of literature 
or art. 

The question of the authorship of the great philosophic 
poems which are the legacy of the Elizabethan Age to us, 
is an incidental question in this inquiry, and is incidentally 
treated here. The discovery of the authorship of these works 
was the necessary incident to that more thorough inquiry into 
their nature and design, of which the views contained in this 
volume are the result. At a certain stage of this inquiry, — 
in the later stages of it, — that discovery became inevitable. 
The primary question here is one of universal immediate 
practical concern and interest. The solution of this literary 
problem, happens to be involved in it. It was the necessary 
prescribed, pre-ordered incident of the reproduction and re- 
integration of the Inductive Philosophy in its application to its 
'principal* and 'noblest subjects/ its ' more chosen subjects.' 

The historical KEY to the Elizabethan Art of Tradition, 
which formed the first book of this work as it was originally 
prepared for the press, is not included in the present pub- 
lication. It was the part of the work first written, and the 
results of more recent research require to be incorporated in 



THE PROPOSITION. XX111 

it, in order that it should represent adequately, in that parti- 
cular aspect of it, the historical discovery which it is the object 
of this work to produce. Moreover, the demonstration which 
is contained in this volume appeared to constitute properly a 
volume of itself. 

Those who examine the subject from this ground, will find 
the external collateral evidence, the ample historical confirma- 
tion which is at hand, not necessary for the support of the 
propositions advanced here, though it will, of course, be in- 
quired for, when once this ground is made. 

The embarrassing circumstances under which this great 
system of scientific practice makes its appearance in history, 
have not yet been taken into the account in our interpretation 
of it. We have already the documents which contain the 
theory and rule of the modern civilisation, which is the civil- 
isation of science in our hands. We have in our hands also, 
newly lit, newly trimmed, lustrous with the genius of our 
own time, that very lamp with which we are instructed to 
make this inquiry, that very light which we are told we must 
bring to bear upon the obscurities of these documents, that very 
light in which we are told, we must unroll them ; for they come 
to us, as the interpreter takes pains to tell us, with an ' infolded ' 
science in them. That light of ' times' that knowledge of the 
conditions under which these works were published, which 
is essential to the true interpretation of them, thanks to our 
contemporary historians, is already in our hands. What we 
need now is to explore the secrets of this philosophy with 
it, — necessarily secrets at the time it was issued — what we 
need now is to open these books of a new learning in it, and 
read them by it. 

In that part of the work above referred to, from which 
some extracts are subjoined for the purpose of introducing 
intelligibly the demonstration contained in this volume, it was 
the position of the Elizabethan Men of Letters that was ex- 
hibited, and the conditions which prescribed to the founders 
of a new school in philosophy, which was none other than the 
philosophy of practice, the form of their works and the conceal- 



XXIV INTRODUCTION. 

ment of their connection with them — conditions which made 
the secret of an Association of ' Naturalists ' applying science 
in that age to the noblest subjects of speculative inquiry, and 
to the highest departments of practice, a life and death 
secret. The physical impossibility of publishing at that time, 
anything openly relating to the questions in which the weal 
of men is most concerned, and which are the primary ques- 
tions of the science of man's relief, the opposition which stood 
at that time prepared to crush any enterprise proposing openly 
for its end, the common interests of man as man, is the point 
which it was the object of that part of the work to exhibit. 
It was presented, not in the form of general statement merely, 
but in those memorable particulars which the falsified, sup- 
pressed, garbled history of the great founder of this school 
betrays to us; not as it is exhibited in contemporary docu- 
ments merely, but as it is carefully collected from these, and 
from the traditions of ' the next ages/ 

That the suppressed Elizabethan Reformers and Innovators 
were men so far in advance of their time, that they were 
compelled to have recourse to literature for the purpose of 
instituting a gradual encroachment on popular opinions, a 
gradual encroachment on the prejudices, the ignorance, the 
stupidity of the oppressed and suffering masses of the human 
kind, and for the purpose of making over the practical de- 
velopment of the higher parts of their science, to ages in 
which the advancements they instituted had brought the 
common mind within hearing of these higher truths; that 
these were men whose aims were so opposed to the power that 
was still predominant then, — though the 'wrestling' that 
would shake that predominance, was already on foot, — that 
it became necessary for them to conceal their lives as well as 
their works, — to veil the true worth and nobility of them, to 
suffer those ends which they sought as means, means which 
they subordinated to the noblest uses, to be regarded in their 
own age as their ends; that they were compelled to play this 
great game in secret, in their own time, referring themselves 
to posthumous effects for the explanation of their designs; 



) 



THE PROPOSITION. XXV 

postponing their honour to ages able to discover their worth; 
this is the proposition which is derived here from the works 
in which the tradition of this learning is conveyed to us. 

But in the part of this work referred to, from which the 
ensuing extracts are made, it was the life, and not merely the 
writings of the founders of this school which was produced in 
evidence of this claim. It was the life in which these dis- 
guised ulterior aims show themselves from the first on the 
historic surface, in the form of great contemporaneous events, 
events which have determined and shaped the course of the 
world's history since then; it was the life in which these in- 
tents show themselves too boldly on the surface, in which 
they penetrate the artistic disguise, and betray themselves to 
the antagonisms which were waiting to crush them ; it was 
the life which combined these antagonisms for its suppression; 
it was the life and death of the projector and founder of the 
liberties of the New World, and the obnoxious historian and 
critic of the tyrannies of the Old, it was the life and death of 
Sir Walter Raleigh that was produced as the Historical Key 
to the Elizabethan Art of Tradition. It was the Man of the 
Globe Theatre, it was the Man in the Tower with his two 
Hemispheres, it was the modern ' Hercules and his load too,' 
that made in the original design of it, the Frontispiece of 
this volume. 

'But stay I see thee in the hemisphere 
Advanced and made a constellation there. 
Shine forth, thou Star of Poets, and with rage 
Or influence, chide or cheer the drooping stage, 
Which since thy flight from hence hath mourned like night, 
And despairs day, but for thy Volume's light. 

[' To draw no envy Shake-spear on thy name, 
Am I thus ample to thy book and fame.' — Ben Jonson.] 

The machinery that was necessarily put in operation for the 
purpose of conducting successfully, under those conditions, any 
honourable or decent enterprise, presupposes a forethought 
and skill, a faculty for dramatic arrangement and successful 
plotting in historic materials, happily so remote from anything 



XXVI INTRODUCTION. 

which the exigencies of our time have ever suggested to us, 
that we are not in a position to read at a glance the history 
of such an age; the history which lies on the surface of such 
an age when such men — men who are men — are at work in 
it. These are the Elizabethan men that we have to interpret 
here, because, though they rest from their labours, their works 
do follow them — the Elizabethan Men of Letters', and we 
must know what that title means before we can read them or 
their works, before we can ' untie their spell? 



THE ELIZABETHAN MEN OF LETTEES. XXvii 



CHAPTER II. 

THE AGE OF ELIZABETH AND THE ELIZABETHAN 
MEN OF LETTERS. 

The times, in many cases, give great light to true interpretations.' 

Advancement of Learning. 

' On fair ground 
I could beat forty of them.' 

' I could myself 
Take up a brace of the best of them, yea the two tribunes' 

' But now 'tis odds beyond arithmetic, 
And manhood is called foolery when it stands 
Against a falling fabric' — Coriolanus. 

rpHE fact that the immemorial liberties of the English People, 
■4- and that idea of human government and society which 
they brought with them to this island, had been a second time 
violently overborne and suppressed by a military chieftainship, 
— one for which the unorganised popular resistance was no 
match, — that the English People had been a second time 
1 conquered' — for that is the word which the Elizabethan 
historian suggests — less than a hundred years before the 
beginning of the Elizabethan Age, is a fact in history which 
the great Elizabethan philosopher has contrived to send down 
to us, along with his philosophical works, as the key to the 
reading of them. It is a fact with which we are all now more 
or less familiar, but it is one which the Elizabethan Poet and 
Philosopher became acquainted with under circumstances 
calculated to make a much more vivid impression on the sen- 
sibilities than the most accurate and vivacious narratives and 
expositions of it which our time can furnish us. 

That this second conquest was unspeakably more degrading 
than the first had been, inasmuch as it was the conquest of a 
chartered, constitutional liberty, recovered and established in 



XXV111 INTRODUCTION. 

acts that had made the English history, recovered on battle-fields 
that were fresh, not in oral tradition only; inasmuch as it was 
effected in violation of that which made the name of English- 
men, that which made the universally recognised principle of the 
national life ; inasmuch, too, as it was an undivided conquest, the 
conquest of the single will — the will of the * one only man' — 
not unchecked of commons only, unchecked by barons, un- 
checked by the church, unchecked by council of any kind, the 
pure arbitrary absolute will, the pure idiosyncrasy, the crowned 
demon of the lawless, irrational will, unchained and armed 
with the sword of the common might, and clothed with the 
divinity of the common right; that this was a conquest un- 
speakably more debasing than the conquest ' commonly so 
called,' — this, which left no nobility, — which clasped its collar 
in open day on the proudest Norman neck, and not on the Saxon 
only, which left only one nation of slaves and bondmen — that this 
was a subjugation — that this was a government which the English 
nation had not before been familiar with, the men whose great 
life-acts were performed under it did not lack the sensibility 
and the judgment to perceive. 

A more hopeless conquest than the Norman conquest had 
been, it might also have seemed, regarded in some of the 
aspects which it presented to the eye of the statesman then ; 
for it was in the division of the former that the element of 
freedom stole in, it was in the parliaments of that division 
that the limitation of the feudal monarchy had begun. 

But still more fatal was the aspect of it which its effects on 
the national character were continually obtruding then on the 
observant eye, — that debasing, deteriorating, demoralising 
effect which such a government must needs exert on such a 
nation, a nation of Englishmen, a nation with such memories. 
The Poet who writes under this government, with an appre- 
ciation of the subject quite as lively as that of any more recent 
historian, speaks of ' the face of men' as a ' motive' — a motive 
power, a revolutionary force, which ought to be sufficient of 
itself to raise, if need be, an armed opposition to such a govern- 
ment, and sustain it, too, without the compulsion of an oath 



THE ELIZABETHAN MEN OP LETTERS. XXIX 

to reinforce it; at least, this is one of the three motives which 
he produces in his conspiracy as motives that ought to suffice to 
supply the power wanting to effect a change in such a govern- 
ment. 

' If not the face of men, 

The sufferance of our souls, the time's abuse, — 

If these be motives weak, break of betimes.' 

There is no use in attempting a change where such motives 
are weak. 

' Break off betimes, 
And every man hence to his idle bed.' 

That this political degradation, and its deteriorating and 
corrupting influence on the national character, was that which 
presented itself to the politician's eye at that time as the most 
fatal aspect of the question, or as the thing most to be depre- 
cated in the continuance of such a state of things, no one who 
studies carefully the best writings of that time can doubt. 

And it must be confessed, that this is an influence which shows 
itself very palpably, not in the degrading hourly detail only 
of which the noble mind is, in such circumstances, the suffer- 
ing witness, and the secretly protesting suffering participator, 
but in those large events which make the historic record. 
The England of the Plantagenets, that sturdy England which 
Henry the Seventh had to conquer, and not its pertinacious 
choice of colours only, not its fixed determination to have the 
choosing of the colour of its own 'Eoses' merely, but its inve- 
terate idea of the sanctity of ' law'' permeating all the masses 

— that was a very different England from the England which 
Henry the Seventh willed to his children ; it was a very dif- 
ferent England, at least, from the England which Henry the 
Eighth willed to his. 

That some sparks of the old fire were not wanting, however, 

— that the nation which had kept alive in the common mind 
through so many generations, without the aid of books, the 
memory of that ' ancestor' that 'made its laws,' was not after 
all, perhaps, without a future — began to be evident about the 
time that the history of ' that last king of England who was 



XXX INTRODUCTION. 

the ancestor' of the English Stuart, was dedicated by the 
author of the Novum Orffanum to the Prince of Wales, after- 
wards Charles I., not without a glance at these portents. 

Circumstances tending to throw doubt upon the durability 
of this institution — circumstances which seemed to portend 
that this monstrous innovation was destined on the whole to 
be a much shorter-lived one than the usurpation it had dis- 
placed — had not been wanting, indeed, from the first, in 
spite of those discouraging aspects of the question which were 
more immediately urged upon the contemporary observer. 

It was in the eleventh century ; it was in the middle of the 
Dark Ages, that the Norman and his followers effected their 
successful landing and lodgement here; it was in the later 
years of the fifteenth century, — it was when the bell that 
tolled through Europe for a century and a half the closing 
hour of the Middle Ages, had already begun its peals, that 
the Tudor ' came in by battle.' 

That magnificent chain of events which begins in the 
middle of the fifteenth century to rear the dividing line 
between the Middle Ages and the Modern, had been slow 
in reaching England with its convulsions: it had originated 
on the continent. The great work of the restoration of the 
learning of antiquity had been accomplished there: Italy, 
Germany, and France had taken the lead in it by turns; 
Spain had contributed to it. The scientific discoveries which 
the genius of Modern Europe had already effected under that 
stimulus, without waiting for the New Organum, had all 
originated on the continent. The criticism on the institutions 
which the decaying Koman Empire had given to its Northern 
conquerors, — that criticism which necessarily accompanied 
the revival of learning began there. Not yet recovered from 
the disastrous wars of the fifteenth century, suffering from the 
diabolical tyranny that had overtaken her at that fatal crisis, 
England could make but a feeble response as yet to these 
movements. They had been going on for a century before 
the influence of them began to be visible here. But they 
were at work here, notwithstanding : they were germinating 



THE ELIZABETHAN MEN OF LETTERS. XXXI 

and taking root here, in that frozen winter of a nation's 
discontent; and when they did begin to show themselves on 
the historic surface, — here in this ancient soil of freedom, — 
in this natural retreat of it, from the extending, absorbing, 
consolidating feudal tyrannies, — here in this * little world 
by itself — this nursery of the genius of the North — with 
its chief races, with its union of races, its f happy breed 
of men,' as our Poet has it, who notes all these points, and 
defines its position, regarding it, not with a narrow English ' 
partiality, but looking at it on his Map of the World, which 
he always carries with him, — looking at it from his ' Globe,' 
which has the Old World and the New on it, and the Past and 
the Future, — ' a precious stone set in the silver sea,' he calls it, 
— ' in a great pool, a swan's nest : — when that seed of all ages 
did at last show itself above the ground here, here in this 
nursery of hope for man, it would be with quite another kind 
of fruit on its boughs, from any that the continent had been 
able to mature from it. 

It was in the later years of the sixteenth century, in the 
latter half of the reign of Elizabeth, that the Printing press, 
and the revived Learning of Antiquity, and the Reformation, 
and the discovery of America, the new revival of the genius 
of the North in art and literature, and the Scientific Dis- 
coveries which accompanied this movement on the continent, 
began to combine their effects here ; and it was about that 
time that the political horizon began to exhibit to the states- 
man's eye, those portents which both the poet and the 
philosopher of that time, have described with so much 
iteration and amplitude. These new social elements did not 
appear to promise in their combination here, stability to the 
institutions which Henry the Seventh, and Henry the Eighth 
had established in this island. 

The genius of Elizabeth conspired with the anomaly of her 
position to make her the steadfast patron and promoter of 
these movements, — worthy grand-daughter of Henry the 
Seventh as she was, and opposed on principle, as she was, 
to the ultimatum to which they were visibly and stedfastly 



XXXU INTRODUCTION. 

tending; but, at the same time, her sagacity and prudence 
enabled her to ward off the immediate result. She secured 
her throne, — she was able to maintain, in the rocking of 
those movements, her own political and spiritual supremacy, — 
she made gain and capital for absolutism out of them, — the 
inevitable reformation she herself assumed, and set bounds to: 
whatever new freedom there was, was still the freedom of her 
will; she could even secure the throne of her successor: it 
was mischief for Charles I. that she was nursing. The con- 
sequence of all this was — the Age of Elizabeth. 

That was what this Queen meant it should be literally, and 
that was what it was apparently. But it so happened, that her 
will and humours on some great questions jumped with the 
time, and her dire necessities compelled her to lead the 
nation on its own track; or else it would have been too late, 
perhaps, for that exhibition of the monarchical institution, — 
that revival of the heroic, and awte-heroic ages, which her 
reign exhibits, to come off here as it did at that time. 

It is this that makes the point in this literary history. This 
is the key that unlocks the secret of the Elizabethan Art of 
Delivery and Tradition. Without any material resources to 
sustain it — strong in the national sentiments, — strong in the 
moral forces with which the past controls the present, — 
strong in that natural abhorrence of change with which nature 
protects her larger growths, — that principle which tyranny 
can test so long with impunity — which it can test with 
impunity, till it forgets that this also has in nature its limits, — 
strong in the absence of any combination of opposition, to the 
young awakening England of that age, that now hollow image 
of the past, that phantom of the military force that had been, 
which seemed to be waiting only the first breath of the 
popular will to dissolve it, was as yet an armed and terrific 
reality; its iron was on every neck, its fetter was on every 
step, and all the new forces, and world-grasping aims and 
aspirations which that age was generating were held down 
and cramped, and tortured in its chains, dashing their eagle 
wings in vain against its iron limits. 



THE ELIZABETHAN MEN OF LETTERS. XXX111 

As yet all England cowered and crouched, in blind ser- 
vility, at the foot of that terrible, but unrecognised embodi- 
ment of its own power, armed out of its own armoury, with 
the weapons that were turned against it. So long as any 
yet extant national sentiment, or prejudice, was not yet 
directly assailed — so long as that arbitrary power was yet 
wise, or fortunate enough to withhold the blow which should 
make the individual sense of outrage, or the feeling of a class 
the common one — so long as those peaceful, social elements, 
yet waited the spark that was wanting to unite them — so 
long ' the laws of England' might be, indeed, at a Falstaff 's 
or a Nym's or a Bardolph's ' commandment,' for the Poet has 
but put into • honest Jack's' mouth, a boast that worse men 
than he, made good in his time — so long, the faith, the lives, 
the liberties, the dearest earthly hopes, of England's proudest 
subjects, her noblest, her bravest, her best, her most learned, 
her most accomplished, her most inspired, might be at the mercy 
of a woman's caprices, or the sport of a fool's sheer will and 
obstinacy, or conditioned on some low-lived ' favorites ' whims. 
So long: And how long was that? — who does not know how 
long it was? — that was long enough for the whole Eliza- 
bethan Age to happen in. In the reign of Elizabeth, and in 
the reign of her successor, and longer still, that was the con- 
dition of it — till its last act was finished — till its last word 
was spoken and penned — till its last mute sign was made — 
till all its celestial inspiration had returned to the God who 
gave it — till all its Promethean clay was cold again. 

This was the combination of conditions of which the Eliza- 
bethan Literature was the result. The Elizabethan Men of 
Letters, the organisers and chiefs of the modern civilization 
were the result of it. 

These were men in whom the genius of the North in its 
happiest union of developments, under its choicest and most 
favourable conditions of culture, in its yet fresh, untamed, 
unbroken, northern vigour, was at last subjected to the stimulus 
and provocation which the ancient learning brings with 
it to the northern mind — to the now unimaginable stimulus 

c 



XXXIV INTRODUCTION. 

which the revival of the ancient art and learning brought 
with it to the mind of Europe in that age, — already secure, 
in its own indigenous development, already advancing to its 
own great maturity under the scholastic culture — the meagre 
Scholastic, and the rich Eomantic culture — of the Mediaeval 
Era. The Elizabethan Men of Letters are men who found 
in those new and dazzling stores of art and literature which 
the movements of their age brought in all their freshly re- 
stored perfection to them, only the summons to their own 
slumbering intellectual activities, — fed with fires that old 
Eastern and Southern civilizations never knew, nurtured in 
the depths of a nature whose depths the northern antiquity 
had made; they were men who found in the learning of 
the South and the East — in the art and speculation that had 
satisfied the classic antiquity — only the definition of their 
own nobler want. 

The first result of the revival of the ancient learning in this 
island was, a report of its ' defects.' The first result of that 
revival here was a map — a universal map of the learning and 
the arts which the conditions of man's life require — a new 
map or globe of learning on which lands and worlds, un- 
dreamed of by the ancients, are traced. ' A map or globe' on 
which ' the principal and supreme sciences,' the sciences that 
are essential to the human kind, are put down among ' the 
parts that lie fresh and waste, and not converted by the 
industry of man.' The first result of the revival of learning 
here was ' a plot' for the supply of these deficiencies. 

The Elizabethan Men of Letters were men, in whom the 
revival of ' the Wisdom of the Ancients,' which in its last 
results, in its most select and boasted conservations had com- 
bined in vain to save antiquity, found the genius of a happier 
race, able to point out at a glance the defect in it; men who 
saw with a glance at those old books what was the matter with 
them ; men prepared already to overlook from the new height 
of criticism which this sturdy insular development of the 
practical genius of the North created , the remains of that lost 
civilization — the splendours rescued from the wreck of em- 



THE ELIZABETHAN MEN OF LETTERS. XXXV 

pires, — the wisdom which had failed so fatally in practice that 
it must needs cross from a lost world of learning to the 
barbarian's new one, to find pupils — that it must needs cross 
the gulf of a thousand years in learning — such work had it 
made of it — ere it could revive, — the wisdom rescued from 
the wreck it had piloted to ruin, not to enslave, and ensnare, 
and doom new ages, and better races, with its futilities, but to 
be hung up with its immortal beacon-light, to shew the track 
of a new learning, to shew to the contrivers of the chart of 
new ages, the breakers of that old ignorance, that old arrogant 
wordy barren speculation. For these men were men who would 
not 6sh up the chart of a drowned world for the purpose of 
seeing how nearly they could conduct another under different 
conditions of time and races to the same conclusion. And 
they were men of a different turn of mind entirely from those 
who lay themselves out on enterprises having that tendency. 
The result of this English survey of learning was the sanc- 
tioned and organised determination of the modern speculation 
to those new fields which it has already occupied, and its 
organised, but secret determination, to that end of a true 
learning which the need of man, in its whole comprehension 
in this theory of it, constitutes. 

But the men with whom this proceeding originates, the 
Elizabethan Men of Letters, were, in their own time, ' the 
Few.' They were the chosen men, not of an age only, but 
of a race, ' the noblest that ever lived in the tide of times ;' men 
enriched with the choicest culture of their age, when that 
culture involved not the acquisition of the learning of the 
ancients only, but the most intimate acquaintance with all 
those recent and contemporaneous developments with which 
its restoration on the Continent had been attended. Was it 
strange that these men should find themselves without 
sympathy in an age like that? — an age in which the masses 
were still unlettered, callous with wrongs, manacled with blind 
traditions, or swaying hither and thither, with the breath of a 
common prejudice or passion, or swayed hither and thither 
by the changeful humours and passions, or the conflicting 

c2 



XXXVI INTRODUCTION. 

dogmas and conceits of their rulers. That is the reason why 
the development of that age comes to us as a Literature. That 
is why it is on the surface of it Elizabethan. That is the 
reason why the leadership of the modern ages, when it was 
already here in the persons of its chief interpreters and pro- 
phets, could get as yet no recognition of its right to teach and 
rule — could get as yet nothing but paper to print itself on, 
nothing but a pen to hew its way with, nor that, without 
death and danger dogging it at the heels, and threatening it, 
at every turn, so that it could only wave, in mute gesticulation, 
its signals to the future. It had to affect, in that time, 
bookishness and wiry scholasticism. It had to put on sedu- 
lously the harmless old monkish gown, or the jester's cap and 
bells, or any kind of a tatterdemalion robe that would hide, 
from head to heel, the waving of its purple. ' Motley s the only 
wear,' whispers the philosopher, peering through his privi- 
leged garb for a moment. King Charles II. had not more 
to do in reserving himself in an evil time, and getting safely 
over to the year of his dominion. 

Letters were the only ships that could pass those seas. But 
it makes a new style in literature, when such men as these, 
excluded from their natural sphere of activity, get driven into 
books, cornered into paragraphs, and compelled to unpack 
their hearts in letters. There is a new tone to the words 
spoken under such compression. It is a tone that the school 
and the cloister never rang with, — it is one that the fancy 
dealers in letters are not able to deal in. They are such words 
as Caesar speaks, when he puts his legions in battle array, — 
they are such words as were heard at Salamis one morning, 
when the breeze began to stiffen in the bay; and though they 
be many, never so many, and though they be musical, as is 
Apollo's lute, that Lacedemonian ring is in each one of them. 
There is great business to be done in them, and their haste 
looks through their eyes. In the sighing of the lover, in the 
jest of the fool, in the raving of the madman, and not in 
Horatio's philosophy only, you hear it. 

The founders of the new science of nature and practice were 



THE ELIZABETHAN MEN OF LETTERS. XXXVll 

men unspeakably too far above and beyond their time, to take 
its bone and muscle with them. There was no lano-uasre in 
which their doctrines could have been openly conveyed to an 
English public at that time without fatal misconception. The 
truth, which was to them arrayed with the force of a universal 
obligation, — the truth, which was to them religion, would 
have been, of course, in an age in which a single, narrow- 
minded, prejudiced Englishwoman's opinions were accepted as 
the ultimate rule of faith and practice, 'flat atheism.' What 
was with them loyalty to the supremacy of reason and con- 
science, would have been in their time madness and rebellion, 
and the majority would have started at it in amazement; and all 
men would have joined hands, in the name of truth and justice, 
to suppress it. The only thing that could be done in such 
circumstances was, to translate their doctrine into the language 
of their time. They must take the current terms — the vague 
popular terms — as they found them, and restrict and enlarge 
them, and inform them with their new meanings, with a hint 
to ' men of understanding ' as to the sense in which they use 
them. That is the key to the language in which their books 
for the future were written. 

But who supposes that these men were so wholly super- 
human, so devoid of mortal affections and passions, so made 
up of c dry light,' that they could retreat, with all those regal 
faculties, from the natural sphere of their activity to the 
scholar's cell, to make themselves over in books to a future in 
which their mortal natures could have no share, — a future 
which could not begin till all the breathers of their world 
were dead? Who supposes that the 'staff'' of Prospero was 
the first choice of these chiefs? — these c heads of the State/ 
appointed of nature to the Cure of the Common- Weal. 

The leading minds of that age are not minds which owed 
their intellectual superiority to a disproportionate development 
of certain intellectual tendencies, or to a dwarfed or inferior 
endowment of those natural affections and personal qualifica- 
tions which tend to limit men to the sphere of their particular 
sensuous existence. The mind of this school is the represen- 



XXXVlll INTRODUCTION. 

tative mind, and all men recognise it as that, because, in its 
products, that nature which is in all men, which philosophy 
had, till then, scorned to recognise, which the abstractionists 
had missed in their abstractions, — that nature of will, and 
sense, and passion, and inanity, is brought out in its true his- 
torical proportions, not as it exists in books, not as it exists in 
speech, but as it exists in the actual human life. It is the 
mind in which this historical principle, this motivity which is 
not reason, is brought in contact with the opposing and con- 
trolling element as it had not been before. In all its earth- 
born Titanic strength and fulness, it is dragged up from its 
secret lurking-places, and confronted with its celestial an- 
tagonist. In all its self-contradiction and cowering unreason, 
it is set face to face with its celestial umpire, and subjected to 
her unrelenting criticism. There are depths in this microcosm 
which this torch only has entered, silences which this speaker 
only has broken, cries which he only knows how to articulate. 

' The soundest disclosing and expounding of men is by their 
natures and ends,' so the one who is best qualified to give us 
information on this question tells us, — by their natures and 
ends; 'the weaker sort by their natures, and the wisest by 
their ends ' ; and ' the distance ' of this wisest sort ' from the 
ends to which they aspire,' is that ' from which one may take 
measure and scale of the rest of their actions and desires.' 

The first end which these Elizabethan Men of Letters 
grasped at, the thing which they pursued with all the in- 
tensity and concentration of a master passion, was — power, 
political power. They wanted to rule their own time, and 
not the future only. ' You are hurt, because you do not 
reign,' is the inuendo which they permit us to apply to them 
as the key to their proceedings. ' Such men as this are never 
at heart's ease,' Caesar remarks in confidence to a friend, 
' whiles they behold a greater than themselves.' ' Come on 
my right hand, for this ear is deaf,' he adds, ' and tell me 
truly what thou think'st of him.' These are the kind of men 
that seek instinctively ' predominance,' not in a clique or 
neighbourhood only, — they are not content with a domestic 



THE ELIZABETHAN MEN OF LETTERS. XXXIX 

reflection of their image, they seek to stamp it on the state 
and on the world. These Elizabethan Men of Letters were 
men who sought from the first, with inveterate determination, 
to rule their own time, and they never gave up that point 
entirely. In one way or another, directly or indirectly, they 
were determined to make their influence felt in that age, in 
spite of the want of encouragement which the conditions of 
that time offered to such an enterprise. But they sought that 
end not instinctively only, but with the stedfastness of a 
rational, scientifically enlightened purpose. It was an enter- 
prise in which the intense motivity of that new and so ' con- 
spicuous ' development of the particular and private nature, 
which lies at the root of such a genius, was sustained by the 
determination of that not less superior development of the 
nobler nature in man, by the motivity of the intellect, by the 
sentiment which waits on that, by the motive of ' the larger 
whole,' which is, in this science of it, ' the worthier.' 

We do not need to apply the key of times to those indirectly 
historical remains in which the real history, the life and soul 
of a time, is always best found, and in which the history of 
such a time, if written at all, must necessarily be inclosed; we 
do not need to unlock these works to perceive the indications 
of suppressed movements in that age, in which the most illus- 
trious men of the age were primarily concerned, the history of 
\ which has not yet fully transpired. We do not need to find 
the key to the cipher in which the history of that time is 
written, to perceive that there was to have been a change in 
the government here at one time, very different from the one 
which afterwards occurred, if the original plans of these men 
had succeeded. It is not the Plays only that are full of that 
frustrated enterprise. 

These were the kind of men who are not easily baffled. 
They changed their tactics, but not their ends; and the enter- 
prises which were conducted with so much secresy under the 
surveillance of the Tudor, began already to crown themselves as 
certainties, and compare their ' olives of endless age ' with the 
' spent tombs of brass' and t tyrant's crests,' at that sure pro- 



xl INTRODUCTION. 

spect which a change of dynasties at that moment seemed to 
open, — at least, to men who were in a position then to esti- 
mate its consequences. 

That this, at all events, was a state of things that was 
not going to endure, became palpable about that time to 
the philosophic mind. The transition from the rule of a 
sovereign who was mistress of ' the situation/ who un- 
derstood that it was a popular power which she was wield- 
ing — the transition from the rule of a Queen instructed 
in the policy of a tyranny, inducted by nature into its arts, 
to the policy of that monarch who had succeeded to her 
throne, and whose ' CREST ' began to be reared here then in 
the face of the insulted reviving English nationality, — this 
transition appeared upon the whole, upon calmer reflection, at 
least to the more patient minds of that age, all that could rea- 
sonably at that time be asked for. No better instrument for 
stimulating and strengthening the growing popular sentiment, 
and rousing the latent spirit of the nation, could have been 
desired by the Elizabethan politicians at that crisis, ' for the 
great labour was with the people' — that uninstructed power, 
which makes the sure basis of tyrannies — that power which 
Mark Antony takes with him so easily — the ignorant, tyran- 
nical, humour-led masses — the masses that still roar their 
Elizabethan stupidities from the immortal groups of Coriolanus 
and Julius Caesar. We ourselves have not yet overtaken the 
chief minds of this age; and the gulf that separated them from 
those overpowering numbers in their own time, to whose 
edicts they were compelled to pay an external submission, was 
broad indeed. The difficulty of establishing an understanding 
with this power was the difficulty. They wanted that 'pulpit' 
from which Brutus and Mark Antony swayed it by turns so 
easily — that pulpit from which Mark Antony showed it 
Caesar's mantle. They wanted some organ of communication 
with these so potent and resistless rulers — some ' chair' from 
which they could repeat to them in their own tongue the story 
of their lost institutions, and revive in them the memory of 
'the kings their ancestors' — some school in which they could 



THE ELIZABETHAN MEN OF LETTERS. xli 

collect them and instruct them in the scientific doctrine of the 
commons, the doctrine of the common-weal and its divine su- 
premacy. They wanted a school in which they could tell them 
stories — stories of various kinds — such stories as they loved 
best to hear — Midsummer stories, or Winter's tales, and stories 
of their own battle-fields — they wanted a school in which they 
could teach the common people History (and not English 
history only), with illustrations, large as life, and a magic 
lantern to aid them, — ' visible history.' 

But to wait till these slow methods had taken effect, would 
be, perhaps, to wait, not merely till their estate in the earth was 
done, but till the mischief they wished to avert was accom- 
plished. And thus it was, that the proposal ' to go the beaten 
track of getting arms into their hands under colour of Caesar' s 
designs, and because the people understood them not,' came to 
be considered. To permit the new dynasty to come in with- 
out making any terms with it, without insisting upon a defini- 
tion of that indefinite power which the Tudors had wielded 
with impunity, and without challenge, would be to make 
needless work for the future, and to ignore criminally the 
responsibilities of their own position, so at least some 
English statesmen of that time, fatally for their favour 
with the new monarch, were known to have thought. ' To 
proceed by process,' to check by gradual constitutional mea- 
sures that overgrown and monstrous power in the state, was 
the project which these statesmen had most at heart. But 
that was a movement which required a firm and enlightened 
popular support. Charters and statutes were dead letters till 
that could be had. It was fatal to attempt it till that was 
secured. Failing in that popular support, if the statesman 
who had attempted that movement, if the illustrious chief, 
and chief man of his time, who headed it, did secretly 
meditate other means for accomplishing the same end — 
which was to limit the prerogative — such means as the 
time offered, and if the evidence which was wanting on 
his trial had been produced in proof of it, who that knows 
what that crisis was would undertake to convict him on 



xlii INTRODUCTION. 

it now? He was arrested on suspicion. He was a 
man who had undertaken to set bounds to the absolute 
will of the monarch, and therefore he was a dangerous 
man.* The charges that were made against him on that 
shameless trial were indignantly repelled? ' Do you mix 
me up with these spiders?' (alluding, perhaps, more particu- 
larly to the Jesuit associated with him in this charge) . ' Do 
you think I am a Jack Cade or a Robin Hood?' he said. But 
though the evidence on this trial is not only in itself illegal, 
and by confession perjured, but the report of it comes to us with 
a falsehood on the face of it, and is therefore not to be taken 
without criticism ; that there was a movement of some kind medi- 
tated about that time, by persons occupying chief places of trust 
and responsibility in the nation — a movement not favourable 
to the continuance of ' the standing departments' in the precise 
form in which they then stood — that the project of an admi- 
nistrative reform had not, at least, been wholly laid aside — that 
there was something which did not fully come out on that trial, 
any one who looks at this report of it will be apt to infer. 

It was a project which had not yet proceeded to any overt 
act; there was no legal evidence of its existence produced on 
the trial; but suppose there were here, then, already, men 
• who loved the fundamental part of state,' more than in such 
a crisis ' they doubted the change of it' — men ' who preferred a 
noble life before a long' — men, too, ' who were more discreet' 
than they were 'fearful' who thought it good practice to 
'jump a body with a dangerous medicine that was sure of 
death without it;' suppose there was a movement of that kind 
arrested here then, and the evidence of it were produced, 
what Englishman, or who that boasts the English lineage 
to-day, can have a word to say about it? Who had a better 
right than those men themselves, those statesmen, those heroes, 
who had waked and watched for their country's weal so long, 

* He (Sir Walter Ealeigh), together with the Lord Chobham, Sir 
J. Fortescue, and others, would have obliged the king to articles before 
he was admitted to the throne, and thought the number of his country- 
men should be limited. — Osbo?'ne , s Memorials of King James. 



THE ELIZABETHAN MEN OF LETTERS. xliii 

who had fought her battles on land and sea, and planned 
them too, not in the tented field and on the rocking deck only, 
but in the more ' deadly breach ' of civil office, whose scaling- 
ladders had entered even the tyrant's council chamber, — who 
had a better right than those men themselves to say whether 
they would be governed by a government of laws, or by the 
will of the most despicable ' one-only-man power/ armed with 
sword and lash, that ever a nation of Oriental slaves in their 
political imbecility cowered under? Who were better qualified 
than those men themselves, instructed in detail in all the peril 
of that crisis, — men who had comprehended and weighed with 
a judgment which has left no successor to its seat, all the con- 
flicting considerations and claims which that crisis brought with 
it, — who better qualified than these to decide on the mea- 
sures by which the hideous nuisances of that time should 
be abated; by which that axe, that sword, that rack, that 
stake, and all those burglar's tools, and highwayman's weapons, 
should be taken out of the hands of the mad licentious 
crew with which an evil time had armed them against the 
common-weal — those weapons of lawless power, which the 
people had vainly, for want of leaders, refused before-hand 
to put into their hands. Who better qualified than these 
natural chiefs and elected leaders of the nation, to decide on 
the dangerous measures for suppressing the innovation, which 
the Tudor and his descendants had accomplished in that 
ancient sovereignty of laws, which was the sovereignty of 
this people, which even the Norman and the Plantagenet, 
had been taught to acknowledge ? Who better qualified than 
they to call to an account — ' the thief,' the ' cut-purse of the 
empire and the rule,' who ' found the precious diadem on a 
shelf, and stole and put it in his pocket' ? 

[' Shall the blessed Sun of Heaven prove a micher, and eat 
blackberries?' A question not to be asked! Shall the blessed 
' Son of England ' prove a thief, and take purses ? A question 
to be asked. ' The poor abuses of the time want countenance.' 

Lear. Take that from me, my friend, who have the power to 
seal the accuser's lips.] 



xliv INTRODUCTION. 

Who better qualified could be found to bead the dangerous 
enterprise for the deliverance of England from that shame, than 
the chief in whom her Alfred arose again to break from her 
neck a baser than the Danish yoke, to restore her kingdom 
and found her new empire, to give her domains, that the sun 
never sets on, — her Poet, her Philosopher, her Soldier, her 
Legislator, the builder of her Empire of the Sea, her founder 
of new ' States.' 

But then, of course, it is only by the rarest conjunction of 
circumstances, that the movements and plans which such a 
state of things gives rise to, can get any other than the most 
opprobrious name and place in history. Success is their only 
certificate of legitimacy. To attempt to overthrow a govern- 
ment still so strongly planted in the endurance and passivity 
of the people, might seem, perhaps, to some minds in these 
circumstances, a hopeless, and, therefore, a criminal under- 
taking. 

1 That opportunity which then they had to take from us, to 
resume, we have again,' might well have seemed a sufficient 
plea, so it could have been made good. But it is not strange 
that some few, even then, should find it difficult to believe 
that the national ruin was yet so entire, that the ashes of the 
ancient nobility and commons of England were yet so cold, 
as that a system of despotism like that which was exercised 
here then, could be permanently and securely fastened over 
them. It is not strange that it should seem to these impossible 
that there should not be enough of that old English spirit which, 
only a hundred years before, had ranged the people in armed 
thousands, in defence of LA.W, against absolutism, enough of 
it, at least, to welcome and sustain the overthrow of tyranny, 
when once it should present itself as a fact accomplished, 
instead of appealing beforehand to a courage, which so many 
instances of vain and disastrous resistance had at last subdued, 
and to a spirit which seemed reduced at last, to the mere 
quality of the master's will. 

That was a narrow dominion apparently to which King 
James consigned his great rival in the arts of government, 



THE ELIZABETHAN MEN OF LETTERS. xlv 

but that rival of his contrived to rear a ' crest ' there which 
will outlast 'the tyrants/ and 'look fresh still' when tombs that 
artists were at work on then ' are spent/ 'And when a soldier 
was his theme, my name — my name [nomme de plume] was 
nor far off/ King James forgot how many weapons this man 
carried. He took one sword from him, he did not know that 
that pen, that harmless goose-quill, carried in its sheath 
another. He did not know what strategical operations the 
scholar, who was ' an old soldier ' and a politician also, was 
capable of conducting under such conditions. Those were 
narrow quarters for ' the Shepherd of the Ocean/ for the hero 
of the two hemispheres, to occupy so long; but it proved no 
bad retreat for the chief of this movement, as Ire managed it. 
It was in that school of Elizabethan statesmanship which had 
its centre in the Tower, that many a scholarly English gentle- 
man came forth prepared to play his part in the political 
movements that succeeded. It was out of that school of states- 
manship that John Hampden came, accomplished for his part 
in them. 

The papers that the chief of the Protestant cause prepared 
in that literary retreat to which the Monarch had consigned 
him, by means of those secret channels of communication 
among the better minds which he had established in the reign 
of Elizabeth, became the secret manual of the revolutionary 
chiefs; they made the first blast of the trumpet that summoned 
at last the nation to its feet. ' The famous Mr. Hamden ' (says 
an author, who writes in those ' next ages' in which so many 
traditions of this time are still rife) ' a little before the civil 
wars was at the charge of transcribing three thousand four 
hundred and fifty-two sheets of Sir Walter Raleigh's MSS., 
as the amanuensis himself told me, who had his close chamber, 
his fire and candle, with an attendant to deliver him the originals 
and take his copies as fast as he could write them.' That of itself 
is a pretty little glimpse of the kind of machinery which the . 
Elizabethan literature required for its ' delivery and tradition ' 
at the time, or near the times, in which it was produced. That 
is a view of ' an Interior ' ' before the civil wars.' It was John 



xlvi INTRODUCTION. 

Milton who concluded, on looking over, a long time afterwards, 
one of the unpublished papers of this statesman, that it was 
his duty to give it to the public. ' Having had,' he says, 
' the MS. of this treatise [' The Cabinet Council '] written by 
Sir Walter Ealeigh, many years in my hands, and finding it 
lately by chance among other books and papers, upon reading 
thereof, I thought it a kind of injury to withhold longer the 
work of so eminent an author from the public; it being both 
answerable in style to other works of his already extant, as 
far as the subject would permit, and given me for a true copy 
by a learned man at his death, who had collected several 
such pieces.' 

( A kind of injury? — That is the thought which would 
naturally take possession of any mind, charged with the re- 
sponsibility of keeping back for years this man's writings, 
especially his choicest ones — papers that could not be pub- 
lished then on account of the subject, or that came out with the 
leaves uncut, labouring with the restrictions which the press 
opposed then to the issues of such a mind. 

That great result which the chief minds of the Modern 
Ages, under the influence of the new culture, in that secret 
association of them were able to achieve, that new and all 
comprehending science of life and practice which they made it 
their business to perfect and transmit, could not, indeed, as yet 
be communicated directly to the many. The scientific doctrines 
of the new time were necessarily limited in that age to the 
few. But another movement corresponding to that, simulta- 
neous in its origin, related to it in its source, was also in pro- 
gress here then, proceeding hand in hand with this, playing 
its game for it, opening the way to its future triumph. This 
was that movement of the new time, — this was that conse- 
quence, not of the revival of learning only, but of the growth 
of the northern mind which touched everywhere and directly 
. the springs of government, and made ' bold power look pale,' 
for this was the movement in ' the many.' 

This was the movement which had already convulsed the 
continent ; this was the movement of which Ealeigh was from 



THE ELIZABETHAN MEN OF LETTERS. xlvii 

the first the soldier ; this was ' the cause ' of which he 
became the chief. It was as a youth of seventeen, bursting 
from those old fastnesses of the Middle Ages that could not 
hold him any longer, shaking off the films of Aristotle and 
his commentators, that he girded on his sword for the great 
world-battle that was raging already in Europe then. It was 
into the thickest of it, that his first step plunged him. 
For he was one of that company of a hundred English gen- 
tlemen who were waiting but for the first word of permission 
from Elizabeth to go as volunteers to the aid of the Huguenots. 
This was the movement which had at last reached England. 
And like these other continental events which were so slow 
in taking effect in England when it did begin to unfold here 
at last ; there was a taste of ' the island ' in it, in this also. 

It was not on the continent only, that Raleigh and other 
English statesmen were disposed to sustain this movement. 
It was not possible as yet to bring the common mind openly 
to the heights of those great doctrines of life and practice 
which the Wisdom of the Moderns also embodies, but the 
new teachers of that age knew how to appreciate, as the man 
of science only can fully appreciate, the worth of those 
motives that were then beginning to agitate so portentously 
so large a portion of the English people. The Elizabethan 
politicians nourished and patronised in secret that growing 
faction. The scientific politician hailed with secret delight, 
hailed as the partner of his own enterprise, that new element 
of political power which the changing time began to reveal 
here then, that power which was already beginning to unclasp 
on the necks of the masses, the collar of the absolute will — 
that was already proclaiming, in the stifled undertones of ' that 
greater part which carries it,' another supremacy. They gave 
in secret the right hand of a joyful fellowship to it. At 
home and abroad the great soldier and statesman, who was the 
first founder of the Modern Science, headed that faction. He 
fought its battles by land and sea ; he opened the New World 
to it, and sent it there to work out its problem. 

It was the first stage of an advancement that would not 



xlvili INTRODUCTION. 

rest till it found its true consummation. That infinity which 
was speaking in its confused tones, as with the voice of many 
waters, was resolved into music and triumphal marches in the 
ear of the Interpreter. It gave token that the nobler nature 
had not died out under the rod of tyranny ; it gave token 
of the earnestness that would not be appeased until the ends 
that were declared in it were found. 

But at the same time, this w T as a power which the wise men 
of that age were far from being willing to let loose upon 
society then in that stage of its development; very far were 
they from being willing to put the reins into its hands. To 
balance the dangers that were threatening the world at that 
crisis was always the problem. It was a very narrow line that 
the policy which was to save the state had to keep to then. 
There were evils on both sides. But to the scientific mind there 
appeared to be a choice in them. The measure on one side 
had been taken, and it was in all men's hearts, but the abysses 
on the other no man had sounded. ' The danger of stirring 
things,' — the dangers, too, of that unscanned swiftness that 
too late ties leaden pounds to his heels were the dangers that were 
always threatening the Elizabethan movement, and defining 
and curbing it. The wisest men of that time leaned to- 
wards the monarchy, the monarchy that was, rather than the 
anarchy that was threatening them. The will of the one 
rather than the wills of the many, the head of the one rather 
than f the many-headed/ To effect the change which the time 
required without ' wrenching all' — without undoing the work 
of ages — without setting at large from the restraints of 
reverence and custom (the chained tiger of an unenlightened 
popular will,jthis was the problem. . The wisest statesmen, the 
most judicious that the world has ever known were here, with 
their new science, weighing in exactest scales those issues. 
We must not quarrel with their concessions to tyranny on the 
one hand, nor with their determination to effect changes on 
the other, until we are able to command entirely the position 
they occupied, and the opposing dangers they had always to 
consider. We must not judge them till they have had their 



THE ELIZABETHAN MEN" OF LETTEKS. xlix 

hearing. What freedom and what hope there is of it upon the 
earth to-day, is the legacy of their perseverance and endurance. 

They experienced many defeats. The hopes of youth, the 
hopes of manhood in turn grew cold. That the 'glorious day' 
which ' flattered the mountain tops' of their immortal morning 
with its sovereign eye would never shine on them; that their 
own, with all its unimagined splendours obscured so long, 
would go down hid in those same ' base clouds,' that for 
them the consummation was to ' peep about to find themselves 
dishonourable graves' was the conviction under which their 
later tasks were achieved. It did not abate their ardour. They 
did not strain one nerve the less for that. 

Driven from one field, they showed themselves in another. 
Driven from the open field, they fought in secret. ' I will 
bandy with thee in faction, I will o'errun thee with policy, I 
will kill thee a hundred and fifty ways,' the Jester who 
brought their challenge said. The Elizabethan England re- 
jected the Elizabethan Man. She would have none of his 
meddling with her affairs. She sent him to the Tower, and 
to the block, if ever she caught him meddling with them. 
She buried him alive in the heart of his time. She took the 
seals of office, she took the sword, from his hands and put a 
pen in it. She would have of him a Man of Letters. And a 
Man of Letters he became. A Man of Eunes. He invented 
new letters in his need, letters that would go farther than the 
sword, that carried more execution in them than the great 
seal. Banished from the state in that isle to which he 
was banished, he found not the base-born Caliban only, to 
instruct, and train, and subdue to his ends, but an Ariel, 
an imprisoned Ariel, waiting to be released, able to conduct 
his masques, able to put his girdles round the earth, and to 
' perform and point ' to his Tempest. 

' Go bring the rabble, o'er whom I give thee power, here 
to this place,' was the New Magician's word.* 

* Here is another version of it. 

'When Sir Nicholas Bacon, the Lord Keeper, lived, every room in 
Gorhambury was served with a jtipe of water from the pond distant 

d 



1 INTRODUCTION. 

This is not the place for the particulars of this history or 
for the barest outline of them. They make a volume of 
themselves. But this glimpse of the circumstances under 
which the works were composed which it is the object of this 
volume to open, appeared at the last moment to be required, 
in the absence of the Historical Key, which the proper de- 
velopment of them makes, to that Art of Delivery and Tra- 
dition by means of which the secrets of the Elizabethan Age 
have been conveyed to us. 



about a mile off. In the lifetime of Mr. Anthony Bacon the 'water 
ceased, and his lordship coming to the inheritance could not recover 
the water without infinite charge. When he was Lord Chancellor, he 
built Verulani House close by the pond yard, for a place of privacy 
when he was called upon to dispatch any urgent business. And being 
asked why he built there, his lordship answered that, seeing he could 
not carry the water to his House, he would carry his House to the 
water. 



EXTRACTS FROM RALEIGll's LIFE. li 



[EXTRACTS FROM THE LTFE OF RALEIGH.] 

CHAPTER III. 
EALEIGH'S SCHOOL. 

'Our court shall be a little Academe, 
Still and contemplative in living Art.' 

1 What is the end of study ? let me know.' 

Love's Labour's Lost. 

T)UT it was not on the New World wholly, that this man 
- L ^ of many toils could afford to lavish the revenues which 
the Queen's favour brought him. It was not to that enter- 
prise alone that he was willing to dedicate the eclat and 
influence of his rising name. There was work at home which 
concerned him more nearly, not less deeply, to which that 
new influence was made at once subservient; and in that 
there were enemies to be encountered more formidable than the 
Spaniard on his own deck, or on his own coast, with all his 
war-weapons and defences. It was an enemy which required 
a strategy more subtle than any which the exigencies of camp 
and field had called for. 

The fact that this hero throughout all his great public 
career — so full of all kinds of excitement and action — enough, 
one would say, to absorb the energies of a mind of any or- 
dinary human capacity — that this soldier whose name had 
become, on the Spanish coasts, what the name of ' Cceur de 
Lion was in the Saracen nursery, that this foreign adventurer 
who had a fleet of twenty-three ships sailing at one time on 
his errands — this legislator, for he sat in Parliament as repre- 
sentative of his native shire — this magnificent courtier^ who 
had raised himself, without any vantage-ground at all, from a 
position wholly obscure, by his personal achievements and 
merits, to a place in the social ranks so exalted; to a place in 

d'2 



Hi INTRODUCTION. 

the state so near that which was chief and absolute — the fact 
that this many-sided man of deeds, was all the time a literary 
man, not a scholar merely, but himself an Originator, a 
Teacher, the Founder of a School — this is the explanatory 
point in this history — this is the point in it which throws 
light on all the rest of it, and imparts to it its true dignity. 

For he was not a mere blind historical agent, driven by 
fierce instincts, intending only their own narrow ends, with- 
out any faculty of comprehensive survey and choice of inten- 
tions; impelled by thirst of adventure, or thirst of power, or 
thirst of gold, to the execution of his part in the great human 
struggle for conservation and advancement; working like 
other useful agencies in the Providential Scheme — like ' the 
stormy wind fulfilling his pleasure/ 

There is, indeed, no lack of the instinctive element in 
this heroic ' composition;' there is no stronger and more 
various and complete development of it. That ' lumen 
siccum,' which his great contemporary is so fond of referring 
to in his philosophy, that dry light which is so apt, he tells us, 
in most men's minds, to get ' drenched' a little sometimes, in 
' the humours and affections/ and distorted and refracted in 
their mediums, did not always, perhaps, in its practical deter- 
minations, escape from that accident even in the philosopher's 
own; but in this stormy, world-hero, there was a latent 
volcano of will and passion ; there was, in his constitution, ' a 
complexion' which might even seem to the bystanders to 
threaten at times, by its ' o'ergrowth,' the 'very pales and 
forts of reason'; but the intellect was, notwithstanding, in its 
due proportion in him; and it was the majestic intellect that 
triumphed in the end. It was the large and manly compre- 
hension, ' the large discourse looking before and after,' it was 
the overseeing and active principle of ' the larger whole,' that 
predominated and had the steering of his course. It is the 
common human form which shines out in him and makes that 
manly demonstration, which commands our common respect, in 
spite of those particular defects and o'ergrowths which are apt 
to mar its outline in the best historical types and patterns of it, 



EXTRACTS FROM RALEIGH'S LIFE. liii 

we have been able to get as yet. It was the intellect, and the 
sense which belongs to that in its integrity — it was the truth 
and the feeling of its obligation, which was sovereign with 
him. For this is a man who appears to have been occupied 
with the care of the common-weal more than with anything 
else; and that, too, under great disadvantages and impedi- 
ments, and when there was no honour in caring for it truly, 
but that kind of honour which he had so much of; for this was 
the time precisely which the poet speaks of in that play in 
which he tells us that the end of playing is ' to give to the 
very age and body of the time its form and pressure. 1 This 
was the time when ' virtue of vice must pardon beg, and curb 
and beck for leave to do it good.' It was the relief of man's 
estate, or the Creator's glory, that he busied himself about; 
that was the end of his ends; or if not, then was he, indeed, 
no hero at all. For it was the doctrine of his own school, and 
' the first human principle' taught in it, that men who act 
without reference to that distinctly human aim, without that 
manly consideration and /hW-liness of purpose, can lay no 
claim either to divine or human honours; that they are not, in 
fact, men, but failures; specimens of an unsuccessful attempt 
in nature, at an advancement; or, as his great conternporayr 
states it more clearly, ' only a nobler kind of vermin.' 

During all the vicissitudes of his long and eventful public 
life, Raleigh was still persistently a scholar. He carried his 
books — his ' trunk of books' with him in all his adventurous 
voyages ; and they were his ' companions ' in the toil and 
excitement of his campaigns on land. He studied them in 
the ocean-storm ; he studied them in his tent, as Brutus studied 
in his. He studied them year after year, in the dim light which 
pierced the deep embrasure of those walls with which tyranny 
had thought to shut in at last his world-grasping energies. 

He had had some chance to study ' men and manners ' in 
that strange and various life of his, and he did not lack the 
skill to make the most of it; but he was not content with 
that narrow, one-sided aspect of life and. human nature, to 
which his own individual personal experience, however varied, 



liv INTRODUCTION. 

must necessarily limit him. He would see it under greater 
varieties, under all varieties of conditions. He would know 
the history of it; he would ' delve it to the root/ He would 
know how that particular form of it, which he found on the 
surface in his time, had come to be the thing he found it. He 
would know what it had been in other times, in the beginning, 
or in that stage of its development in which the historic light 
first finds it. He was a man who wished even to know what 
it had been in the Assyrian, in the Phenician, in the Hebrew, in 
the Egyptian', he would see what it had been in the Greek, and 
in the Roman. He was, indeed, one of that clique of Eliza- 
bethan Naturalists, who thought that there was no more 
curious thing in nature; and instead of taking a Jack Cade 
view of the subject, and inferring that an adequate know- 
ledge of it comes by nature, as reading and writing do in 
that worthy's theory of education, it was the private opinion of 
this school, that there was no department of learning which a 
scholar could turn his attention to, that required a more severe 
and thorough study and experiment, and none that a man of 
a truly scientific turn of mind would find better worth his 
leisure. And the study of antiquity had not yet come to be 
then what it is now ; at least, with men of this stamp. Such 
men did not study it to discipline their minds, or to get a 
classic finish to their style. The books that such a man as 
this could take the trouble to carry about with him on such 
errands as those that he travelled on, were books that had in 
them, for the eager eyes that then o'er-ran them, the world's 
' news ' — the world's story. They were full of the fresh living 
data of his conclusions. They were notes that the master 
minds of all the ages had made for him; invaluable aid and 
sympathy they had contrived to send to him. The man who 
had been arrested in his career, more ignominiously than the 
magnificent Tully had been in his, — in a career, too, a thou- 
sand times more noble, — by a Caesar, indeed, but such a 
Caesar; — the man who had sat for years with the execu- 
tioner's block in bis yard, waiting only for a scratch of the 
royal pen, to bring down upon him that same edge which the 



EXTRACTS FROM RALEIGll'S LIFE. lv 

poor Cicero, with all his truckling, must feel at last, — such a 
one would look over the old philosopher's papers with an ap- 
prehension of their meaning, somewhat more lively than that 
of the boy who reads them for a prize, or to get, perhaps, 
some classic elegancies transfused into his mind. 

During the ten years which intervene between the date of 
Raleigh's first departure for the Continent and that of his be- 
ginning favour at home, already he had found means for ekeing 
out and perfecting that liberal education which Oxford had only 
begun for him, so that it was as a man of rarest literary accom- 
plishments that he made his brilliant debut at the English Court, 
where the new Elizabethan Age of Letters was just then 
beginning. 

He became at once the centre of that little circle of high- 
born wits and poets, the elder wits and poets of the Elizabethan 
age, that were then in their meridian there. Sir Philip Sidney 
Thomas Lord Buckhurst, Henry Lord Paget, Edward Earl of 
Oxford, and some others, are included in the cotemporary list 
of this courtly company, whose doings are somewhat mys- 
teriously adverted to by a critic, who refers to the condition of 
'the Art of Poesy' at that time. ' The gentleman who wrote 
the late Shepherds Calendar'' was beginning then to attract 
considerable attention in this literary aristocracy. 

The brave, bold genins of Raleigh flashed new life into that 
little nucleus of the Elizabethan development. The new 
' Round Table] which that newly -beginning age of chivalry, 
with its new weapons and devices, and its new and more 
heroic adventure had created, was not yet ' full' till he came 
in. The Round Table grew rounder with this knight's pre- 
sence. Over those dainty stores of the classic ages, over those 
quaint memorials of the elder chivalry, that were spread out 
on it, over the dead letter of the past, the brave Atlantic breeze 
came in, the breath of the great future blew, when the turn 
came for this knight's adventure; whether opened in the prose 
of its statistics, or set to its native music in the mystic melodies 
of the bard who was there to sing it. The Round Table grew 
spheral, as he sat talking by it; the Round Table dissolved, as 



lvi INTRODUCTION. 

he brought forth his lore, and unrolled his maps upon it; and 
instead of it, — with all its fresh yet living interests, tracked 
out by land and sea, with the great battle-ground of the future 
outlined on it, — revolved the round world. ' Universality' was 
still the motto of these Paladins; but 'the Globe' — the 
Globe, with its TWO hemispheres, became henceforth their 
device. 

The promotion of Raleigh at Court was all that was needed 
to make him the centre and organiser of that new intellectual 
movement which was then just beginning there. He addressed 
himself to the task as if he had been a man of literary tastes and 
occupations merely, or as if that particular crisis had been a time 
of literary leisure with him, and there were nothing else to be 
thought of just then. The relation of those illustrious literary 
partners, of his, whom he found already in the field when he 
first came to it, to that grand development of the English 
genius in art and philosophy which follows, ought not indeed 
to be overlooked or slightly treated in any thorough history of 
it. For it has its first beginning here in this brilliant assem- 
blage of courtiers, and soldiers, and scholars, — this company 
of Poets, and Patrons and Encouvagers of Art and Learning. 
Least of all should the relation which the illustrious founder 
of this order sustains to the later development be omitted in 
any such history, — ' the prince and mirror of all chivalry,' the 
patron of the young English Muse, whose untimely fate keeps 
its date for ever green, and fills the air of this new ' Helicon.' 
with immortal lamentations. The shining foundations of that so 
splendid monument of the later Elizabethan genius, which has 
paralyzed and confounded all our criticism, were laid here. 
The extraordinary facilities which certain departments of lite- 
rature appeared to offer, for evading the restrictions which this 
new poetic and philosophic development had to encounter from 
the first, already began to attract the attention of men ac- 
quainted with the uses to which it had been put in antiquity, 
and who knew what gravity of aim, what height of execution, 
that then rude and childish English Play had been made to 
exhibit under other conditions ; — men fresh from the study of 



EXTRACTS FROM RALEIGH'S LIFE. lvii 

those living and perpetual monuments of learning, which the 
genius of antiquity has left in this department. But the first 
essays of the new English scholarship in this untried field, — 
the first attempts at original composition here, derive, it must 
be confessed, their chief interest and value from that memor- 
able association in which we find them. It was the first essay, 
which had to be made before those finished monuments of art, 
which command our admiration on their own account wholly, 
could begin to appear. It was ' the tuning of the instruments, 
that those who came afterwards might play the better. 1 We 
see, of course, the stiff, cramped hand of the beginner here, 
instead of the grand touch of the master, who never comes till 
his art has been prepared to his hands, — till the details of its 
execution have been mastered for him by others. In some 
arts there must be generations of essays before he can get his 
tools in a condition for use. Ages of prophetic genius, gene- 
rations of artists, who dimly saw afar off, and struggled after 
his perfections, must patiently chip and daub their lives away, 
before ever the star of his nativity can begin to shine. 

Considering what a barbaric age it was that the English 
mind was emerging from then; and the difficulties attending 
the first attempt to create in the English literature, anything 
which should bear any proportion to those finished models of 
skill which were then dazzling the imagination of the English 
scholar in the unworn gloss of their fresh revival here, and 
discouraging, rather than stimulating, the rude poetic experi- 
ment; — considering what weary lengths of essay there are 
always to be encountered, where the standard of excellence is 
so far beyond the power of execution ; we have no occasion to 
despise the first bold attempts to overcome these difficulties 
which the good taste of this company has preserved to us, 
They are just such works as we might expect under those 
circumstances; — yet full of the pedantries of the new acqui- 
sition, overflowing on the surface with the learning of the 
school, sparkling with classic allusions, seizing boldly on the 
classic original sometimes, 'and working their new fancies into 
it; but, full already of the riant vigour and originality of the 



lviii INTRODUCTION.. 

Elizabethan inspiration; and never servilely copying a foreign 
original. The English genius is already triumphant in them. 
Their very crudeness is not without its historic charm, when 
once their true place in the structure we find them in, is 
recognised. In the later works, this crust of scholarship has 
disappeared, and gone below the surface. It is all dissolved, 
and gone into the clear intelligence ; — it has all gone to feed 
the majestic current of that new, all-subduing, all-grasping 
originality. It is in these earlier performances that the 
stumbling-blocks of our present criticism are strewn so 
thickly. Nobody can write any kind of criticism of the 
' Comedy of Errors,' for instance, without recognizing the 
Poet's acquaintance with the classic mode!*, — without recog- 
nizing the classic treatment. ' Love's Labour's Lost,' ' The 
Taming of the Shrew/ the condemned parts of ' Henry 
the VI. / and generally the Poems which are put down in our 
criticism as doubtful, or as the earlier Poems, are just those 
Poems in which the Poet's studies are so flatly betrayed on 
the surface. Among these are plays which were anonymously 
produced by the company performing at the Kose Theatre, 
and other companies which English noblemen found occasion 
to employ in their service then. These were not so much as 
produced at the theatre which has had the honor of giving 
its name to other productions, bound up with them. We shall 
find nothing to object to in that somewhat heterogeneous col- 
lection of styles, which even a single Play sometimes exhibits, 
when once the history of this phenomenon accompanies it. 
The Cathedrals that were built, or re-built throughout, just at 
the moment in which the Cathedral Architecture had attained 
its ultimate perfection, are more beautiful to the eye, perhaps, 
than those in which the story of its growth is told from the 
rude, massive Anglo-Saxon of the crypt or the chancel, to the 
last refinement of the mullion, and groin, and tracery. But 
the antiquary, at least, does not regret the preservation. And 
these crude beginnings here have only to be put in their place, 

* See a recent criticism in ' The Times.' 



EXTRACTS FROM RALEIGH'S LIFE. lix 

to command from the critic, at least, a similar respect. For 
here, too, the history reports itself to the eye, and not less 
palpably. 

It may seem surprising, and even incredible, to the modern 
critic, that men in this position should find any occasion to 
conceal their relation to those quite respectable contributions 
to the literature of the time, which they found themselves 
impelled to make. The fact that they did so, is one that we 
must accept, however, on uncontradicted cotemporary testi- 
mony, and account for it as we can. The critic who published 
his criticisms when ' the gentleman who wrote the late 
Shepherd's Calendar' was just coming into notice, however 
inferior to our modern critics in other respects, had certainly 
a better opportunity of informing himself on this point, than 
they can have at present. ' They have writ excellently well,' 
he says of this company of Poets, — this ' courtly company,' as 
he calls them, — ' they have writ excellently well, if their 
doings could be found out and made public with the rest.' Sir 
Philip Sidney, Raleigh, and the gentleman who wrote the 
late Shepherd's Calendar, are included in the list of Poets to 
whom this remark is applied. It is Raleigh's verse which is 
distinguished, however, in this commendation as the most 
'lofty, insolent, and passionate;' a description which applies 
to the anonymous poems alluded to, but is not particularly 
applicable to those artificial and tame performances which he 
was willing; to acknowledge. And this so commanding- Poet, 
who was at the same time an aspiring courtier and meddler in 
affairs of state, and who chose, for some mysterious reason or 
other, to forego the honours which those who were in the secret 
of his literary abilities and successes, — the very best judges of 
poetry in that time, too, were disposed to accord him, — and 
we are not without references to cases in antiquity correspond- 
ing very nearly to this; and which seemed to furnish, at least, 
a sufficient precedent for this proceeding ; — this so successful 
poet, and courtier, and great man of his time, was already in 
a position to succeed at once to that chair of literary pa- 
tronage which the death of Sir Philip Sidney had left vacant. 



lx INTRODUCTION. 

Instinctively generous, he was ready to serve the literary 
friends whom he attracted to him, not less lavishly than he 
had served the proud Queen herself, when he threw his gay 
cloak in her obstructed path, — at least, he was not afraid of 
risking those sudden splendours which her favour was then 
showering upon him, by wearying her with petitions on their 
behalf. He would have risked his new favour, at least with 
his ' Cynthia/ — that twin sister of Phoebus Apollo, — to make 
her the patron, if not the inspirer of the Elizabethan genius. 
• When will you cease to be a beggar, Raleigh?' she said to 
him one day, on one of these not infrequent occasions. 'When 
your Majesty ceases to be a most gracious mistress,' was this 
courtier's reply. It is recorded of her, that ' she loved to hear 
his reasons to her demands.' 

But though, with all his wit and eloquence, he could not 
contrive to make of the grand-daughter of Henry the Seventh, 
a Pericles, or an Alexander, or a Ptolemy, or an Augustus, 
or an encourager of anything that did not appear to be 
directly connected with her own particular ends, he did 
succeed in making her indirectly a patron of the literary and 
scientific development which was then beginning to add to 
her reign its new lustre, — which was then suing for leave to 
lay at her feet its new crowns and garlands. Indirectly, he 
did convert her into a patron, — a second-hand patron of those 
deeper and more subtle movements of the new spirit of the 
time, whose bolder demonstrations she herself had been forced 
openly to head. Seated on the throne of Henry the Seventh, 
she was already the armed advocate of European freedom; — 
Raleigh had contrived to make her the legal sponsor for the 
New World's liberties; it only needed that her patronage 
should be systematically extended to that new enterprise for 
the emancipation of the human life from the bondage of 
ignorance, from the tyranny of unlearning, — that enterprise 
which the gay, insidious Elizabethan literature was already 
beginning to flower over and cover with its devices, — it 
only needed that, to complete the anomaly of her position. 
And that through Raleigh's means was accomplished. 



EXTRACTS EKOM liALElGH's LIFE. lxi 

He became himself the head of a little Alexandrian estab- 
lishment. His house was a home for men of learning. He 
employed men in literary and scientific researches on his 
account, whose business it was to report to him their results. 
He had salaried scholars at his table, to impart to him their 
acquisitions, Antiquities, History, Poetry, Chemistiy, Mathe- 
matics, scientific research of all kinds, came under his active 
and persevering patronage. Returning from one of his visits 
to Ireland, whither he had gone on this occasion to inspect a 
seignorie which his ' sovereign goddess ' had then lately con- 
ferred upon him, he makes his re-appearance at court with 
that so obscure personage, the poet of the ' Faery Queene,' under 
his wing; — that same gentleman, as the court is informed, 
whose bucolics had already attracted so much attention in 
that brilliant circle. By a happy coincidence, Raleigh, it 
seems, had discovered this Author in the obscurity of his 
clerkship in Ireland, and had determined to make use of his 
own influence at court to push his brother poet's fortunes there; 
but his efforts to benefit this poor bard personally, do not 
appear to have been attended at any time with much success. 
The mysterious literary partnership between these two, how- 
ever, which dates apparently from an earlier period, con- 
tinues to bring forth fruit of the most successful kind; and 
the- ' Faery Queene' is not the only product of it. 

All kinds of books began now to be dedicated to this new 
and so munificent patron of arts and letters. His biographers 
collect his public history, not from political records only, but 
from the eulogies of these manifold dedications. Ladonnier, 
the artist, publishes his Sketches of the New World through 
his aid. Hooker dedicates his History of Ireland to him; 
Hakluyt, his Voyages to Florida. A work ' On Friendship ' is 
dedicated to him ; another ' On Music,' in which art he had 
found leisure, it seems, to make himself a proficient; and as to 
the poetic tributes to him, — some of them at least are familiar 
to us already. In that gay court, where Raleigh and his 
haughty rivals were then playing their deep games, — where 
there was no room for Spenser's muse, and the worth of his 



lxii INTRODUCTION. 

'Old Song' was grudgingly reckoned, — the c rustling in silks' 
is long since over, but the courtier's place in the pageant of 
the 'Faery Queene' remains, and grows clearer with the lapse 
of ages. That time, against which he built so perseveringly, 
and fortified himself on so many sides, will not be able to 
diminish there ' one dowle that's in his plume.'* 

In the Lord Timon of the Shakspere piece, which was re- 
written from an Academic original after Kaleigh's consignment 
to the Tower, — in that fierce satire into which so much 
Elizabethan bitterness is condensed, under the difference of 
the reckless prodigality which is stereotyped in the fable, we 
get, in the earlier scenes, some glimpses of this ' Athenian ' 
also, in this stage of his career. 

But it was not as a Patron only, or chiefly, that he aided 
the new literary development. A scholar, a scholar so earnest, 
so indefatigable, it followed of course that he must be, in one 
form or another, an Instructor also; for that is still, under all 
conditions, the scholar's destiny — it is still, in one form or 
another, his business on the earth. But with that tempera- 
ment which was included among the particular conditions of 
his genius, and with those special and particular endowments 
of his for another kind of intellectual mastery, he could not be 
content with the pen — with the Poet's, or the Historian's, or 
the Philosopher's pen — as the instrument of his mental dicta- 
tion. A Teacher thus furnished and ordained, seeks, indeed, 
naturally and instinctively, a more direct and living and 
effective medium of communication with the audience which 
his time is able to furnish him, whether 'few' or many, 
whether ' fit' or unfit, than the book can give him. He must 
have another means of ' delivery and tradition,' when the 
delivery or tradition is addressed to those whom he would 
associate with him in his age, to work with him as one 
man, or those to whom he would transmit it in other ages, to 



* He was also a patron of Plays and Players in this stage of hi3 
career, and entertained private parties at his house with very recherche 
■performances of that kind sometimes. 



EXTRACTS FROM RALEIGH'S LIFE. lxiii 

carry it on to its perfection — tbose to whom he would com- 
municate his own highest view, those whom he would inform 
with his patiently-gathered lore, those whom he would instruct 
and move with his new inspirations. For the truth has 
become a personality with him — it is his nobler self. He 
will live on with it. He will live or die with it. 

For such a one there is, perhaps, no institution ready in 
his time to accept his ministry. No chair at Oxford or Cam- 
bridge is waiting for him. For they are, of course, and must 
needs be, the strong-holds of the past — those ancient and 
venerable seats of learning, ' the fountains and nurseries of all 
the humanities/ as a Cambridge Professor calls them, in a 
letter addressed to Raleigh. The principle of these larger 
wholes is, of course, instinctively conservative. Their business 
is to know nothing of the itew. The new intellectual move- 
ment must fight its battles through without, and come off 
conqueror there, or ever those old Gothic doors will creak on 
their reluctant hinges to give it ever so pinched an entrance. 
When it has once fought its way, and forced itself within — 
when it has got at last some marks of age and custom on its 
brow — then, indeed, it will stand as the last outwork of that 
fortuitous conglomeration, to be defended in its turn against 
all comers. Already the revived classics had been able to 
push from their chairs, and drive into corners, and shut up 
finally and put to silence, the old Aristotelian Doctors — the 
Seraphic and Cherubic Doctors of their day — in their own 
ancient halls. It would be sometime yet, perhaps, however, 
before that study of the dead languages, which was of course 
one prominent incident of the first revival of a dead learning, 
would come to take precisely the same place in those insti- 
tutions, with their one instinct of conservation and ' abhor- 
rence of change,' which the old monastic philosophy had taken 
in its day; but that change once accomplished, the old 
monastic philosophy itself, religious as it was, was never held 
more sacred than this profane innovation would come to be. 
It would be some time before those new observations and ex- 
periments, which Raleigh and his school were then beginning 



lxiv INTRODUCTION. 

to institute, experiments and inquiries which the universities 
would have laughed to scorn in their day, would come to be 
promoted to the Professor's chair; but when they did, it would 
perhaps be difficult to convince a young gentleman liberally 
educated, at least, under the wings of one of those ' ancient 
and venerable' seats of learning, now gray in Raleigh's youthful 
West — ambitious, perhaps, to lead off in this popular innova- 
tion, where Saurians, and Icthyosaurians, and Entomologists, 
and Chonchologists are already hustling the poor Greek and 
Latin Teachers into corners, and putting them to silence with 
their growing terminologies — it would perhaps be difficult 
to convince one who had gone through the prescribed course 
of treatment in one of these ' nurseries of humanity,' that the 
knowledge of the domestic habits and social and political 
organisations of insects and shell-fish, or even the experiments 
of the laboratory, though never so useful and proper in their 
place, are not, after all, the beginning and end of a human 
learning. It was no such place as that that this department of 
the science of nature took in the systems or notions of its 
Elizabethan Founders. They were l Naturalists,' indeed ; but 
that did not imply, with their use of the term, the absence of 
the natural common human sense in the selection of the 
objects of their pursuits. ' It is a part of science to make 
judicious inquiries and wishes,' says the speaker in chief for 
this new doctrine of nature; speaking of the particular and 
special applications of it which he is forbidden to make openly, 
but which he instructs, and prepares, and charges his followers 
to make for themselves. 

One of those innovations, one of those movements in which 
the new ground of ages of future culture is first chalked out — 
a movement whose end is not yet, whose beginning we have 
scarce yet seen — was made in England, not very far from the 
time in which Sir Walter Raleigh began first to convert the 
eclat of his rising fortunes at home, and the splendour of his 
heroic achievements abroad, and all those new means of influ- 
ence which his great position gave him, to the advancement of 
those deeper, dearer ambitions, which the predominance of the 



EXTRACTS FROM RALEIGH'S LIFE. Ixv 

nobler elements in his constitution made inevitable with him. 
Even then he was ready to endanger those golden opinions, 
waiting to be worn in their newest gloss, not cast aside so 
soon, and new- won rank, and liberty and life itself, for the 
sake of putting himself into his true intellectual relations with 
his time, as a philosopher and a beginner of a new age in the 
human advancement. For ' spirits are not finely touched but 
to fine issues.' 

If there was no Professor's Chair, if there was no Pulpit or 
Bishop's Stall waiting for him, and begging his acceptance of 
its perquisites, he must needs institute a chair of his own, and 
pay for leave to occupy it. If there was no university with 
its appliances within his reach, he must make a university of 
his own. The germ of a new ' universality ' would not be 
wanting in it. His library, or his drawing-room, or his 
1 banquet,' will be Oxford enough for him. He will begin it 
as the old monks began theirs, with their readings. Where 
the teacher is, there must the school be gathered together. 
And a school in the end there will be : a school in the end 
the true teacher will have, though he begin it, as the barefoot 
Athenian began his, in the stall of the artisan, or in the chat 
of the Gymnasium, amid the compliments of the morning 
levee, or in the woodland stroll, or in the midnight revel of 
the banquet. 

When the hour and the man are indeed met, when the time 
is ripe, and one truly sent, ordained of that Power which 
chooses, not one only — what uncloaked atheism is that, to 
promulgate in an age like this ! — not the Teachers and 
Eabbies of one race only, but all the successful agents of 
human advancement, the initiators of new eras of man's pro- 
gress, the inaugurators of new ages of the relief of the human 
estate and the Creator's glory — when such an one indeed ap- 
pears, there will be no lack of instrumentalities. With some 
verdant hill-side, it may be, some blossoming knoll or ' mount' 
for his ' chair,' with a daisy or a lily in his hand, or in a 
fisherman's boat, it may be, pushed a little way from the 
strand, he will begin new ages. 

e 



lxvi INTRODUCTION. 

The influence of Baleigh upon his time cannot yet be fully 
estimated; because, in the first place, it was primarily of that 
kind which escapes, from its subtlety, the ordinary historical 
record; and, in the second place, it was an influence at the 
time necessarily covert, studiously disguised. His relation to 
the new intellectual development of his age might, perhaps, be 
characterised as Socratic; though certainly not because he 
lacked the use, and the most masterly use, of that same weapon 
with which his younger contemporary brought out at last, in 
the face of his time, the plan of the Great Instauration. In 
the heart of the new establishment which the magnificent 
courtier, who was a ' Queen's delight,' must now maintain, 
there soon came to be a little ' Academe.' The choicest youth 
of the time, ' the Spirits of the Morning Sort,' gathered about 
him. It was the new philosophic and poetic genius of the 
age that he attracted to him ; it was on that philosophic and 
poetic genius that he left his mark for ever. 

He taught them, as the masters taught of old, in dialogues 

— in words that could not then be written, in words that 
needed the master's modulation to give them their significance. 
For the new doctrine had need to be clothed in a language of 
its own, whose inner meaning only those who had found their 
way to its inmost shrine were able to interpret. 

We find some contemporary and traditional references to 
this school, which are not without their interest and historical 
value, as tending to show the amount of influence which it 
was supposed to have exerted on the time, as well as the ac- 
knowledged necessity for concealment in the studies pursued 
in it. The fact that such an Association existed, that it began 
with Raleigh, that young men of distinction were attracted to 
it, and that in such numbers, and under such conditions, that 
it came to be considered ultimately as a 'School,' of which he 
was the head-master — the fact that the new experimental 
science was supposed to have had its origin in this association, 

— that opinions, differing from the received ones, were also 
secretly discussed in it, — that anagrams and other devices were 
made use of for the purpose of infolding the esoteric doctrines of 



EXTRACTS FROM RALEIGH'S LIFE. lxvii 

the school in popular language, so that it was possible to write 
in this language acceptably to the vulgar, and without violating 
preconceived opinions, and at the same time instructively to 
the initiated, — all this remains, even on the surface of state- 
ments already accessible to any scholar, — all this remains, either 
in the form of contemporary documents, or in the recollections 
of persons who have apparently had it from the most authentic 
sources, from persons who profess to know, and who were at 
least in a position to know, that such was the impression at the 
time. 

But when the instinctive dread of innovation was already 
so keenly on the alert, when Elizabeth was surrounded with 
courtiers still in their first wrath at the promotion of the new 
' favourite/ indignant at finding themselves so suddenly over- 
shadowed with the growing honours of one who had risen 
from a rank beneath their own, and eagerly watching for an 
occasion against him, it was not likely that such an affair as 
this was going to escape notice altogether. And though the 
secresy with which it was conducted, might have sufficed to 
elude a scrutiny such as theirs, there was another, and more 
eager and subtle enemy, — an enemy which the founder of 
this school had always to contend with, that had already, day 
and night, at home and abroad, its Argus watch upon him. 
That vast and secret foe, which lie had arrayed against him 
on foreign battle fields, knew already Avhat kind of embodi- 
ment of power this was that was rising into such sudden favour 
here at home, and would have crushed him in the germ — that 
foe which would never rest till it had pursued him to the 
block, which was ready to join hands with his personal ene- 
mies in its machinations, in the court of Elizabeth, as well as 
in the court of her successor, that vast, malignant, indefatigable 
foe, in which the spirit of the old ages lurked, was already at 
his threshold, and penetrating to the most secret chamber of his 
councils. It was on the showing of a Jesuit that these friendly 
gatherings of young men at Kaleigh's table came to be 
branded as ' a school of Atheism/ And it was through such, 
agencies, that his enemies at court were able to sow suspicions 

e 2 



lxviii INTRODUCTION. 

in Elizabeth's mind in regard to the entire orthodoxy of his 
mode of explaining certain radical points in human belief, and 
in regard to the absolute ' conformity ' of his views on these 
points with those which she had herself divinely authorised, 
suspicions which he himself confesses he was never afterwards 
able to eradicate. The matter was represented to her, we are 
told, ' as if he had set up for a doctor in the faculty and invited 
young gentlemen into his school, where the Bible was jeered 
at/ and the use of profane anagrams was inculcated. The 
fact that he associated with him in his chemical and mathe- 
matical studies, and entertained in his house, a scholar 
labouring at that time under the heavy charge of getting up 
' a philosophical theology/ was also made use of greatly to 
his discredit. 

And from another uncontradicted statement, which dates 
from a later period, but which comes to us worded in terms 
as cautious as if it had issued directly from the school itself, 
we obtain another glimpse of these new social agencies, with 
which the bold, creative, social genius that was then seeking 
to penetrate on all sides the custom-bound time, would have 
roused and organised a new social life in it. It is still the 
second-hand hearsay testimony which is quoted here. ' He is 
said to have set up an Office of Address, and it is supposed 
that the office might respect a more liberal intercourse — a nobler 
mutuality of advertisement, than would perhaps admit of 
all sorts of persons.' 'Raleigh set up a kind of Office of 
Address,' says another, ' in the capacity of an agency for 
all sorts of persons.' John Evelyn, refers also to that long 
dried fountain of communication which Montaigne first 
proposed, Sir Walter Raleigh put in practice, and Mr. 
Hartlib endeavoured to renew.' 

' This is the scheme described by Sir W. Pellis, which is 
referred traditionally to Raleigh and Montaigne (see Book I. 
chap, xxxiv.) An Office of Address whereby the wants of all 
may be made known to ALL (that painful and great instru- 
ment of this design), where men may know what is already done 
in the business of learning, what is at present in doing, and what 



EXTRACTS FROM RALEIGH'S LIFE. Ixix 

is intended to be done, to the end that, by such a general com- 
munication of design and mutual assistance, the wits and endeavours 
of the world may no longer be as so many scattered coals, which, 
for want of union, are soon quenched, whereas being laid to- 
gether they would have yielded a comfortable light and heat. 
[This is evidently, traditional, language] . . . such as advanced 
rather to the improvement of men themselves than their means.' 
— Oldys. 

This then is the association of which Raleigh was the 
chief; this was the state, within the state which he was 
founding. (' See the reach of this man,' says Lord Coke on 
his Trial.) It is true that the honour is also ascribed to Mon- 
taigne; but we shall find, as we proceed with this inquiry, that 
all the works and inventions of this new English school, of 
which Raleigh was chief, all its new and vast designs for man's 
relief, are also claimed by that same aspiring gentleman, as 
they were, too, by another of these Egotists, who came out in 
his own name with this identical project. 

It was only within the walls of a school that the great 
principle of the new philosophy of fact and practice, which 
had to pretend to be profoundly absorbed in chemical 
experiments, or in physical observations, and inductions 
of some kind — though not without an occasional hint, of 
a broader intention, — it was only in esoteric language that 
the great principles of this philosophy could begin to be set 
forth in their true comprehension. The very trunk of it, the 
primal science itself, must needs be mystified and hidden in a 
shower of metaphysical dust, and piled and heaped about with 
the old dead branches of scholasticism, lest men should see for 
themselves how broad and comprehensive must be the ultimate 
sweep of its determinations ; lest men should see for themselves, 
how a science which begins in fact, and returns to it again, which 
begins in observation and experiment, and returns in scientific 
practice, in scientific arts, in scientific re-formation, might have 
to do, ere all was done, with facts not then inviting scientific 
investigation — with arts not then inviting scientific reform.. 

In consequence of a sudden and common advancement of 



lxx INTRODUCTION. 

intelligence among the leading men of that age, which left 
the standard of intelligence represented in more than one of 
its existing institutions, very considerably in the rear of its 
advancement, there followed, as the inevitable result, a ten- 
dency to the formation of some medium of expression, — 
whether that tendency was artistically developed or not, in 
which the new and nobler thoughts of men, in which their 
dearest beliefs, could find some vent and limited interchange 
and circulation, without startling the ear. Eventually there 
came to be a number of men in England at this time, — and 
who shall say that there were none on the continent of this 
school, — occupying prominent positions in the state, heading, 
it might be, or ranged in opposite factions at Court, who could 
speak and write in such a manner, upon topics of common 
interest, as to make themselves entirely intelligible to each 
other, without exposing themselves to any of the risks, 
which confidential communications under such circumstances 
involved. 

For there existed a certain mode of expression, originating 
in some of its more special forms with this particular school, 
yet not altogether conventional, which enabled those who 
made use of it to steer clear of the Star Chamber and its 
sister institution; inasmuch as the terms employed in this 
mode of communication were not in the more obvious inter- 
pretation of them actionable, and to a vulgar, unlearned, or 
stupid conceit, could hardly be made to appear so. There 
must be a High Court of Wit, and a Bench of Peers in that 
estate of the realm, or ever these treasons could be brought 
to trial. For it was a mode of communication which in- 
volved in its more obvious construction the necessary submission 
to power. It was the instructed ear, — the ear of a school, — 
which was required to lend to it its more recondite meanings ; 
— it was the ear of that new school in philosophy which had 
made History the basis of its learning, — which, dealing with 
principles instead of words, had glanced, not without some 
nice observation in passing, at their more Conspicuous' his- 
torical 'instances'; — it Was the ear of a school which had 



EXTRACTS FROM RALEIGH'S LIFE. lxxi 

everywhere the great historical representations and diagrams 
at its control, and could substitute, without much hindrance, 
particulars for generals, or generals for particulars, as the 
case might be; it was the ear of a school intrusted with 
discretionary power, but trained and practised in the art of 
using it. 

Originally an art of necessity, with practice, in the skilful 
hands of those who employed it, it came at length to have a 
charm of its own. In such hands, it became an instrument of 
literary power, which had not before been conceived of; a 
medium too of densest ornament, of thick crowding conceits, 
and nestling beauties, which no style before had ever had 
depth enough to harbour. It established a new, and more 
intimate and living relation between the author and his 
reader, — between the speaker and his audience. There was 
ever the charm of that secret understanding lending itself to 
all the effects. It made the reader, or the hearer, participator 
in the artist's skill, and joint proprietor in the result. The 
author's own glow must be on his cheek, the author's own 
flash in his eye, ere that result was possible. The nice point 
of the skilful pen, the depth of the lurking tone was lost, 
unless an eye as skilful, or an ear as fine, tracked or waited on 
it. It gave to the work of the artist, nature's own style; — it 
gave to works which had the earnest of life and death in 
them the sport of the ' enigma.' 

It is not too much to say, that the works of Raleigh and 
Bacon, and others whose connection with it it is not necessary 
to specify just here, are written throughout in the language of 
this school. ' Our glorious Willy' — (it is the gentleman who 
wrote the ' Faery Queene' who claims him, and his glories, as 
' ours'), — ' our glorious Willy' was born in it, and knew no 
other speech. It was that ' Round Table' at which Sir Philip 
Sydney presided then, that his lurking meanings, his unspeak- 
able audacities first ' set in a roar.' It was there, in the keen 
encounters of those flashing 'wit combats,' that the weapons 
of great genius grew so fine. It was there, where the young 
wits and scholars, fresh from their continental tours, full of the 
gallant young England of their day, — the Mercutios, the 



lxxii INTRODUCTION. 

Benedicts, the Birons, the Longuevilles, came together fresh 
from the Court of Navarre, and smelling of the lore of their 
foreign ' Academe/ or hot from the battles of continental 
freedom, — it was there, in those reunions, that our Poet caught 
those gracious airs of his — those delicate, thick-flowering 
refinements — those fine impalpable points of courtly breeding 
— those aristocratic notions that haunt him everywhere. It 
was there that he picked up his various knowledge of men and 
manners, his acquaintance with foreign life, his bits of travel- 
led wit, that flash through all. It was there that he heard 
the clash of arms, and the ocean-storm. And it was there 
that he learned ' his old ward.' It was there, in the social 
collisions of that gay young time, with its bold over-flowing 
humours, that would not be shut in, that he first armed 
himself with those quips and puns, and lurking conceits, that 
crowd his earlier style so thickly, — those double, and triple, 
and quadruple meanings, that stud so closely the lines of his 
dialogue in the plays which are clearly dated from that era, — 
the natural artifices of a time like that, when all those new 
volumes of utterance which the lips were ready to issue, were 
forbidden on pain of death to be ' extended,' must needs ' be 
crushed together, infolded within themselves.' 

Of course it would be absurd, or it would involve the most 
profound ignorance of the history of literature in general, to 
claim that the principle of this invention had its origin here. 
It had already been in use, in recent and systematic use, in 
the intercourse of the scholars of the Middle Ages; and its 
origin is coeval with the origin of letters. The free-masonry 
of learning is old indeed. It runs its mountain chain of 
signals through all the ages, and men whom times and kindreds 
have separated ascend from their week-day toil, and hold 
their Sabbaths and synods on those heights. They whisper, 
and listen, and smile, and shake the head at one another; 
they laugh, and weep, and complain together; they sing their 
songs of victory in one key. That machinery is so fine, 
that the scholar can catch across the ages, the smile, or the 
whisper, which the contemporary tyranny had no instrument 
firm enough to suppress, or fine enough to detect. 



EXTRACTS FROM RALEIGH'S LIFE. lxxiii 

' But for her father sitting still on hie, 

Did warily still watch the way she went, 
And eke from far observed with jealous eie, 
"Which way his course the wanton Bregog bent. 

Him to deceive, for all his watchful ward, 

The wily lover did devise this slight. 
First, into many parts, his stream he shared, 

That whilst the one was watch'd, the other might 

Pass unespide, to meet her by the way. 

And then besides, those little streams, so broken, 
He under ground so closely did convey, 

That of their passage doth appear no token' 

It was the author of the 'Faery Queene,' indeed, his fine, 
elaborate, fertile genius burthened with its rich treasure, and 
stimulated to new activity by his poetical alliance with 
Raleigh, whose splendid invention first made apparent the 
latent facilities which certain departments of popular literature 
then offered, for a new and hitherto unparalleled application of 
this principle. In that prose description of his great Poem 
which he addresses to Kaleigh, the distinct avowal of a double 
intention in it, the distinction between a particular and general 
one, the emphasis with which the elements of the ideal name, 
are discriminated and blended, furnish to the careful reader 
already some superficial hints, as to the capabilities of such a 
plan to one at all predisposed to avail himself of them. And, 
indeed, this Poet's manifest philosophical and historical ten- 
dencies, and his avowed view of the comprehension of the 
Poet's business would have seemed beforehand to require some 
elbow-room, — some chance for poetic curves and sweeps, — 
some space for the line of beauty to take its course in, which 
the sharp angularities, the crooked lines, the blunt bringing 
up everywhere, of the new philosophic tendency to history 
would scarcely admit of. There was no breathing space for 
him, unless he could contrive to fix his poetic platform so 
high, as{ to be able to override these restrictions without 
hindrance. 

' For the Poet thrusteth into the midst, even where it most 
concerneth him ; and then recoursing to the things fore-past, and 



lxxiv • INTRODUCTION. 

divining of things to come, he maketh a pleasing analysis of 

ALL.' 

And it so happened that his Prince Arthur had dreamed 
the poet's dream, the hero's dream, the philosopher's dream, 
the dream that was dreamed of old under the Olive shades, the 
dream that all our Poets and inspired anticipators of man's 
perfection and felicity have always been dreaming; but this 
one ' awakening' determined that it should be a dream no 
longer. It was the hour in which the genius of antiquity 
was reviving; it was the hour in which the poetic inspiration 
of all the ages was reviving, and arming itself with the know- 
ledge of • things not dreamt of by old reformers — that know- 
ledge of nature which is power, which is the true magic. For 
this new Poet had seen in a vision that same ' excellent beauty' 
which ' the divine' ones saw of old, and ' the New Atlantis,' 
the celestial vision of her kingdom ; and being also ' ravished 
with that excellence, and awakening, he determined to seek 
her out. And so being by Merlin armed, and by Timon 
thoroughly instructed, he went forth to seek her in Fairy 
Land.' There was a little band of heroes in that age, a little 
band of philosophers and poets, secretly bent on that same 
adventure, sworn to the service of that same Gloriana, though 
they were fain to wear then the scarf and the device of 
another Queen on their armour. It is to the prince of this 
little band — ' the prince and mirror of all chivalry' — that this 
Poet dedicates his poem. But it is Raleigh's device which he 
adopts in the names he uses, and it is Raleigh who thus shares 
with Sydney the honour of his dedication. 

' In that Faery Queene, I mean,' he says, in his prose descrip- 
tion of the Poem addressed to Raleigh, ' in that Faery Queene, 
I mean Glory in my general intention ; but, in my particular, 
I conceive the most glorious person of our sovereign the 
Queen, and her kingdom — in Fairy Land. 

1 And yet, in some places, I do otherwise shadow her. For 
considering she beareth two persons, one of a most Royal Queen 
or Empress, the other of a most virtuous and beautiful 
lady — the latter part I do express in Bel-Phebe, fashioning 



EXTRACTS FROM RALEIGH'S L*IFE. IxXV 

her name according to your own most excellent conceit of 
' Cynthia,' 1 Phebe and Cynthia being both names of Diana' 
And thus he sings his poetic dedication : — 

1 To thee, that art the Summer's Nightingale, 
Thy sovereign goddess's most dear delight, 
Why do I send this rustic madrigal, 
That may thy tuneful ear unseason quite 1 
Thou, only fit this argument to write, 
In whose high thoughts pleasure hath built her bower, 
And dainty love learn'd sweetly to indite. 
My rhymes, I know, unsavoury are and soure 
To taste the streams, which like a golden showre, 
Flow from thy fruitful head of thy love's praise. 
Fitter, perhaps, to thunder martial stowre* 
When thee so list thy tuneful thoughts to raise, 
Yet till that thou thy poem wilt make known, 
Let thy fair Cynthia's praises be thus rudely shown.' 

' Of me,' says Raleigh, in a response to this obscure partner 
of his works and arts, — a response not less mysterious, till we 
have found the solution of it, for it is an enigma. 

1 Of me no lines are loved, no letters are of price, 
Of all that speak the English tongue, but those of thy device? \ 

It is to Sidney, Raleigh, and the Poet of the ' Faery-Queene,' 
and the rest of that courtly company of Poets, that the co- 
temporary author in the Art of Poetry alludes, with a special 
commendation of Raleigh's vein, as the ' most lofty, insolent, 
and passionate/ when he says, ' they have writ excellently well, 
if their doings could be found out and made public with the 
rest.' 

* ' Shine forth, thou Star of Poets, and with rage 
Or influence chide, or cheer the drooping stage.' 

Ben Jonson. 

+ It was a ' device' that symbolised all. It was a circle containing 
the alphabet, or the ABC, and the esoteric meaning of it was ' all in 
each? or all in all, the new doctrine of the unity of science (the 
' Ideas' of the New ' Academe'). That was the token-name under which 
a great Book of this Academy was issued. t 



lxxvi ' INTRODUCTION. 



CHAPTER IV. 
THE NEW ACADEMY. 

EXTRACT FROM A LATER CHAPTER OF RALEIGH'S LIFE. 

Oliver. Where will the old Duke live? 

Charles. They say he is already in the forest of Arden, and a many 
merry men with him; and there they live like the old Robin Hood of 
England: they say many young gentlemen flock to him every day; 
and fleet the time carelessly as they did in the golden world. 

As You Like It. 

Stephano [sings]. 

Flout 'em and skout'emj and skout'em and flout 'em, 
Thought is free. 
Cal. That 's not the tune. 

[Ariel plays the tune on a tabor and pipe. 
Ste. What is this same ? 

Trin. This is the tune of our catch, played by — the picture of — 
Nobody. 

5fC 5JC 7v »f% 

BUT all was not over with him in the old England yet — 
the present had still its chief tasks for him. 
The man who had ' achieved ' his greatness, the chief who 
had made his way through such angry hosts of rivals, and 
through such formidable social barriers, from his little seat in 
the Devonshire corner to a place in the state, so commanding, 
that even the jester, who was the ' Mr. Punch' of that day, 
conceived it to be within the limits of his prerogative to call 
attention to it, and that too in ' the presence ' itself* — a place 
of command so acknowledged, that even the poet could call 
him in the ear of England ' her most dear delight' — such a 
one was not going to give up so easily the game he had been 
playing here so long. He was not to be foiled with this great 
flaw in his fortunes even here; and though all his work 
appeared for the time to be undone, and though the eye that 
he had fastened on him was * the eye' that had in it ' twenty 
thousand deaths.' 

* See 'the knave' commands 'the queen.' — Tarleton. 



EXTRACTS FROM RALEIGH'S LIFE. lxxvii 

It is this patient piecing and renewing of his broken webs, 
it is this second building up of his position rather than the 
first, that shows us what he is. One must see what he con- 
trived to make of those ' apartments ' in the Tower while he 
occupied them; what before uniraagined conveniencies, and 
elegancies, and facilities of communication, and means of oper- 
ation, they began to develop under the searching of his genius: 
what means of reaching and moving the public mind; what 
wires that reached to the most secret councils of state appeared 
to be inlaid in those old walls while he was within them ; what 
springs that commanded even there movements not less strik- 
ing and anomalous than those which had arrested the critical 
and admiring attention of Tarleton under the Tudor administra- 
tion, — movements on that same royal board which Ferdinand 
and Miranda were seen to be playing on in Prosperous cell 
when all was done, — one must see what this logician, who 
was the magician also, contrived to make of the lodging 
which was at first only e the cell ' of a condemned criminal ; 
what power there was there to foil his antagonists, and crush 
them too, — if nothing but throwing themselves under the 
wheels of his advancement would serve their purpose; one 
must look at all this to see ' what manner of man' this was, 
what stuff this genius was made of, in whose heats ideas that 
had been parted from all antiquities were getting welded here 
then — welded so firmly that all futurities would not disjoin 
them, so firmly that thrones, and dominions, and principalities, 
and powers, and the rulers of the darkness of this world might 
combine in vain to disjoin them — the ideas whose union was 
the new ' birth of time/ It is this life in ' the cell * — this 
game, these masques, this tempest, that the magician will com- 
mand there — which show us, when all is done, what new stuff 
of Nature's own this was, in which the new idea of combining 
' the part operative ' and the part speculative of human life — r 
this new thought of making ' the art and practic part of life 
the mistress to its theoric' was understood in this scholar's 
own time (as we learn from the secret traditions of the school) 
to have had its first germination : this idea which is the idea 
of the modern learning — the idea of connecting knowledge 



lxxviii INTRODUCTION. 

generally and in a sytematic manner with the human con- 
duct — knowledge as distinguished from pre-supposition — the 
idea which came out afterwards so systematically and compre- 
hensively developed in the works of his great contemporary 
and partner in arts and learning. 

We must look at this, as well as at some other demonstra- 
tions of which this time was the witness, to see what new 
mastership this is that was coming out here so signally in this 
age in various forms, and in more minds than one; what soul 
of a new era it was that had laughed, even in the boyhood of 
its heroes, at old Aristotle on his throne ; that had made its 
youthful games with dramatic impersonations, and caricatures, 
and travesties of that old book-learning ; that in the glory of 
those youthful spirits — ' the spirits of youths, that meant to 
be of note and began betimes' — it thought itself already com- 
petent to laugh down and dethrone with its ' jests' ; that had 
laughed all its days in secret; that had never once lost a 
chance for a jibe at the philosophy it found in possession of 
the philosophic chairs — a philosophy which had left so many 
things in heaven and earth uncompassed in its old futile 
dreamy abstractions. 

Unless philosophy can make a Juliet, 
Displant a town, reverse a prince's doom, 
Hang up philosophy, 

was the word of the poet of this new school in one of his 
1 lofty and passionate' moods, at a much earlier stage of this 
philosophic development. c See what learning is !' exclaims the 
Nurse, speaking at that same date from the same dictation, 
for there is a Friar ' abroad' there already in the action of 
that play, who is undertaking to bring his learning to bear 
upon practice, and opening his cell for scientific consultation 
and ghostly advice on the questions of the play as they happen 
to arise ; and it is his apparent capacity for smoothing, and re- 
conciling, and versifying, not words only, but facts, which 
commands the Nurse's admiration. 

This doctrine of a practical learning, this part operative of 
the new learning for which the founders of it beg leave to 
reintegrate the abused term of Natural Magic, referring to the 



EXTRACTS FROM RALEIGH'S LIFE. lxxix 

Persians in particular, to indicate the extent of the field which 
their magical operations are intended ultimately to occupy; 
this idea, which the master of this school was illustrating now 
in the Tower so happily, did not originate in the Tower, as 
we shall see. 

The first heirs of this new invention, were full of it. The 
babbling iu fancy of this great union of art and learning, whose 
speech flows in its later works so clear, babbled of nothing else: 
its Elizabethan savageness, with its first taste of learning on its 
lips, with its new classic lore yet stumbling in its speech, 
already, knew nothing else. The very rudest play in all this 
collection of the school, — left to show us the march of that 
' time-bettering age,' the play which offends us most — belongs 
properly to this collection; contains this secret, which is the 
Elizabethan secret, and the secret of that art of delivery and 
tradition which this from the first inevitably created, — yet 
rude and undeveloped, but there. 

We need not go so far, however, as-that, in this not pleasant 
retrospect; for these early plays are not the ones to which the 
interpreter of this school would choose to refer the reader, for 
the proof of its claims at present ; — these which the faults of 
youth and the faults of the time conspire to mar: in which 
the overdoing of the first attempt to hide under a cover suited 
to the tastes of the Court, or to the yet more faulty tastes of the 
rabble of an Elizabethan play-house, — the boldest scientific 
treatment of ' the forbidden questions/ still leaves so much 
upon the surface of the play that repels the ordinary criticism ; 
— these that were first sent out to bring in the rabble of that 
age to the scholar's cell, these in which the new science was 
first brought in, in its slave's costume, with all its native 
glories shorn, and its eyes put out 'to make sport' for the 
Tudor — perilous sport! — these first rude essays of a learning 
not yet master of its unwonted tools, not yet taught how to 
wear its fetters gracefully, and wreathe them over and make 
immortal glories of them — still clanking its irons. There is 
nothing here to detain any criticism not yet instructed in the 
secret of this Art Union. But the faults are faults of execu- 



JXXX INTRODUCTION. 

tion merely; the design of the Novum Organum is not more 
noble, not more clear. 

For these works are the works of that same ' school' which 
the Jesuit thought so dangerous, and calculated to affect un- 
favourably the morality of the English nation — the school 
which the Jesuit contrived to bring under suspicion as a school 
in wh ch doctrines that differed from opinions received on 
essential points were secretly taught, — contriving to infect 
with his views on that point the lady who was understood, at 
that time, to be the only person qualified to reflect on ques- 
tions of this nature; the school in which Raleigh was asserted 
to be perverting the minds of young men by teaching them 
the use of profane anagrams; and it cannot be denied, that 
anagrams, as well as other ' devices in letters,' were made use 
of, in involving ' the bolder meanings' contained in writings 
issued from this school, especially when the scorn with which 
science regarded the things it found set up for its worship 
had to be conveyed sometimes in a point or a word. It is a 
school, whose language might often seem obnoxious to the 
charge of profanity and other charges of that nature to those 
who do not understand its aims, to those who do not know 
that it is from the first a school of Natural Science, whose 
chief department was that history which makes the basis of 
the ' living art,' the art of man's living, the essential art of it, 
— a school in which the use of words was, in fact, more 
rigorous and scrupulous than it had ever been in any other, in 
which the use of words is for the first time scientific, and yet, 
in some respects, more bold and free than in those in which 
mere words, as words, are supposed to have some inherent 
virtue and efficacy, some mystic worth and sanctity in them. 

This was the learning in which the art of a new age and 
race first spoke, and many an old foolish, childish, borrowed 
notion went off like vapour in it at its first word, without any 
one's ever so much as stopping to observe it, any one whose 
place was within. It is the school of a criticism much more 
severe than the criticism which calls its freedom in question. 
It is a school in which the taking of names in vain in general 



EXTRACTS FROM RALEIGH'S LIFE. lxxxi 

is strictly forbidden. That is the first commandment of it, 
and it is a commandment with promise. 

The man who sits there in the Tower, now, driving that 
same 'goose-pen' which he speaks of as such a safe instrument 
for unfolding practical doctrines, with such patient energy, is 
not now occupied with the statistics of Xoah's Ark, grave as 
he looks; though that, too, is a subject which his nautical 
experience and the indomitable bias of his genius as a western 
man towards calculation in general, together with his notion 
that the affairs of the world generally, past as well as future, 
belong properly to his sphere as a man, will require him to 
take up and examine and report upon, before he will think that 
his work is done. It is not a chapter in the History of the 
World which he is composing at present, though that work 
is there at this moment on the table, and forms the ostensible 
state-prison work of this convict. 

This is the man who made one so long ago in those brilliant 
' Kound Table' reunions, in which the idea of converting the 
new belles let/res of that new time, to such grave and politic 
uses was first suggested; he is the genius of that company, 
that even in such frolic mad-cap games as Love's Labour's Lost, 
and the Taming of the Shrew, and Midsummer Kight's 
Dream, could contrive to insert, not the broad farce and bur- 
lesque on the old pretentious wordy philosophy and pompous 
rhetoric it was meant to dethrone only, and not the most perilous 
secret of the new philosophy, only, but the secret of its organ 
of delivery and tradition, the secret of its use of letters, the 
secret of its ' cipher in letters? and not its ' cipher in words ' 
only, the cipher in which the secret of the authorship of these 
works was infolded, and in which it -was found, but not found 
in these earlier plays, — plays in which these so perilous se- 
crets are still conveyed in so many involutions, in passages so 
intricate with quips and puns and worthless trivialities, so 
uninviting or so marred with their superficial meanings, that 
no one would think of looking in them for anything of any 
value. For it is always when some necessary, but not super- 
ficial, question of the play is to be considered, that the Clown 

/ 



lxxxii INTRODUCTION. 

and the Fool are most in request, for ' there be of them that 
will themselves laugh to set on some barren spectators to laugh 
too'; and under cover of that mirth it is, that the grave or 
witty undertone reaches the ear of the judicious. 

It is in the later and more finished works of this school that 
the key to the secret doctrines of it, which it is the object of 
this work to furnish, is best found. But the fact, that in the 
very rudest and most faulty plays in this collection of plays, 
which form so important a department of the works of this 
school, which make indeed the noblest tradition, the only 
adequate tradition, the ' illustrated tradition' of its noblest 
doctrine — the fact that in the very earliest germ of this new 
union of ' practic and theorio,' of art and learning, from which 
we pluck at last Advancements of Learning, and Hamlets, and 
Lears, and Tempests, and the Novum Organum, already the 
perilous secret of this union is infolded, already the entire 
organism that these great fruits and flowers will unfold in such 
perfection is contained, and clearly traceable, — this is a fact 
which appeared to require insertion in this history, and not, 
perhaps, without some illustration. 

' It is not amiss to observe,' says the Author of the Advance- 
ment of Learning, when at last his great exordium to the 
science of nature in man, and the art of culture and cure 
that is based on that science is finished — pausing to observe 
it, pausing ere he will produce his index to that science, to 
observe it : 'It is not amiss to observe' [here], he says — 
(speaking of the operation of culture in general on young 
minds, so forcible, though unseen, as hardly any length of 
time, or contention of labour, can countervail it afterwards) — 
' how small and mean faculties gotten by education, yet when 
they fall into great men, or great matters, do work great and 
important effects; whereof we see a notable example in Tacitus, 
of two stage-players, Percennius and Vibulenus, who, by their 
faculty of playing, put the Pannonian armies into an extreme 
tumult and combustion; for, there arising a mutiny among them, 
upon the death of Augustus Caesar, Blaesus the lieutenant had 
committed some of the mutineers, which were suddenly rescued ; 



EXTRACTS FROM RALEIGH'S LIFE. Ixxxiii 

whereupon Vibulenus got to be heard speak [being a stage- 
player] , which he did in this manner. 

' ' These poor innocent wretches appointed to cruel death, you 
have restored to behold the light: but who shall restore my 
brother to me, or life to my brother, that was sent hither in 
message from the legions of Germany to treat of — the common 
cause? And he hath murdered him this last night by some 
of his fencers and ruffians, that he hath about him for his execu- 
tioners upon soldiers. The mortalest enemies do not deny 
burial ; when I have performed my last duties to the corpse with 
kisses, with tears, command me to be slain besides him, so that 
these, my fellows, for our good meaning and our true hearts to 
the LEGION, may have leave to bury us.' 

' With which speech he put the army into an infinite fury 
and uproar; whereas, truth was, he had no brother, neither 
was there any such matter [in that case], but he played it 
merely as if he had been upon the stage.' 

This is the philosopher and stage critic who expresses a 
decided opinion elsewhere, that ' the play 's the thing/ though 
he finds this kind of writing, too, useful in its way, and for 
certain purposes; but he is the one who, in speaking of the 
original differences in the natures and gifts of men, suggests 
that • there are a kind of men who can, as it were, divide 
themselves;' and he does not hesitate to propound it as his 
deliberate opinion, that a man of wit should have at command 
a number of styles adapted to different auditors and exigencies ; 
that is, if he expects to accomplish anything with his rhetoric. 
That is what he makes himself responsible for from his pro- 
fessional chair of learning; but it is the Prince of Denmark, 
with his remarkable natural faculty of speaking to the point, 
who says, ' Seneca can not be too heavy, nor Plautus too 
light, for — [what? — ] the law of writ — and — the liberty.' 
1 These are the only men,' he adds, referring apparently to that 
tinselled gauded group of servants that stand there awaiting 
his orders. 

' My lord — you played once in the university, you say,' he 
observes afterwards, addressing himself to that so politic states- 

/2 



lxxxiv INTRODUCTION. 

man whose overreaching court plots and performances end for 
himself so disastrously. ' That did I, my lord,' replies Polo- 
nius, 'and was accounted a good actor? ' And what did you 
enact?' ' I did enact Julius Caesar. I was killed i' the Capi- 
tol [I]. Brutus killed me.' ' It was a brute part of him 
[collateral sounds — Elizabethan phonography] to kill so 
capitol a calf there. — Be the players ready? '(?). [That is the 
question.] 
-'While watching the progress of the action at Sadlers' 
Wells,' says the dramatic critic of the ' Times,' in the criticism 
of the Comedy of Errors before referred to, directing attention 
to the juvenile air of the piece, to ' the classic severity in the 
form of the play/ and ' that baldness of treatment which is a 
peculiarity of antique comedy' — ' while watching the progress 
of the action at Sadlers' Wells, we may almost fancy we are at 
St. Peters College, witnessing the annual performance of the 
Queens scholars. 7 That is not surprising to one acquainted 
with the history of these plays, though the criticism which 
involves this kind of observation is not exactly the criticism 
to which we have been accustomed here. But any one who 
wishes to see, as a matter of antiquarian curiosity, or for any 
other purpose, how far from being hampered in the first efforts 
of his genius with this class of educational associations, that 
particular individual would naturally have been, in whose un- 
conscious brains this department of the modern learning is 
supposed to have had its accidental origin, — any one who 
wishes to see in what direction the antecedents of a person in 
that station in life would naturally have biassed, at that time, 
his first literary efforts, if, indeed, he had ever so far escaped 
from the control of circumstances as to master the art of the 
collocation of letters — any person who has any curiosity what- 
ever on this point is recommended to read in this connection 
a letter from a professional cotemporary of this individual — 
one who comes to us with unquestionable claims to our re- 
spect, inasmuch as he appears to have had some care for the 
future, and some object in living beyond that of promoting 
his own. immediate private interests and sensuous gratification. 



EXTRACTS FROM RALEIGH'S LIFE. lxXXV 

It is a letter of Mr. Edward Alleyn (the founder of Dulwich 
College), published by the Shakspere Society, to which we are 
compelled to have recourse for information on this interesting 
question; inasmuch as that distinguished cotemporary and 
professional rival of his referred to, who occupies at present so 
large a space in the public eye, as it is believed for the best of 
reasons, has failed to leave us any specimens of his method of 
reducing his own personal history to writing, or indeed any 
demonstration of his appreciation of the art of chirography, in 
general. He is a person who appears to have given a decided 
preference to the method of oral communication as a means of 
effecting his objects. But in reading this truly interesting 
document from the pen of an Elizabethan player, who has 
left us a specimen of his use of that instrument usually so 
much in esteem with men of letters, we must take into account 
the fact, that this is an exceptional case of culture. It is the 
case of a player who aspired to distinction, and who had raised 
himself by the force of his genius above his original social 
level; it is the case of a player who has been referred to re- 
cently as a proof of the position which it was possible for ' a 
stage player' to attain to under those particular social con- 
ditions. 

But as this letter is of a specially private and confidential 
nature, and as this poor player who did care for the future, 
and who founded with his talents, such as they were, a noble 
charity, instead of living and dying to himself, is not to blame 
for his defects of education, — since his acts command our 
respect, however faulty his attempts at literary expression, — 
this letter will not be produced here. But whoever has read 
it, or whoever may chance to read it, in the course of an anti- 
quarian research, will be apt to infer, that whatever educa- 
tional bias the first efforts of genius subjected to influences of 
the same kind would naturally betray, the faults charged upon 
the Comedy of Errors, the leaning to the classics, the taint of 
St. Peter's College, the tone of the Queen's scholars, are hardly 
the faults that the instructed critic would look for. 

But to ascertain the fact, that the controlling idea of that 



Ixxxvi INTRODUCTION. 

new learning which the Man in the Tower is illustrating now 
in so grand and mature a manner, not with his pen only, but 
with his ' living art,' and with such an entire independence of 
classic models, is already organically contained in those earlier 
works on which the classic shell is still visible, it is not neces- 
sary to go back to the Westminster play of these new classics, 
or to the performances of the Queen's Scholars. Plays having 
a considerable air of maturity, in which the internal freedom 
of judgment and taste is already absolute, still exhibit on the 
surface of them this remarkable submission to the ancient 
forms which are afterwards rejected on principle, and by a 
rule in the new rhetoric — a rule which the author of the 
Advancement of Learning is at pains to state very clearly. 
The wildness of which we hear so much, works itself out upon 
the surface, and determines the form at length, as these players 
proceed and grow bolder with their work. A play, second to 
none in historical interest, invaluable when regarded simply 
in its relation to the history of this school, one which may 
be considered, in fact, the Introductory Play of the New 
School of Learning, is one which exhibits very vividly these 
striking characteristics of the earlier period. It is one in which 
the vulgarities of the Play-house are still the cloak of the 
philosophic subtleties, and incorporated, too, into the philo- 
sophic design; and it is one in which the unity of design, that 
one design which makes the works of this school, from first to 
last, as the work of one man, is still cramped with those 
other unities which the doctrines of Dionysus and the 
mysteries of Eleusis prescribed of old to their interpreters. 
' What is the end of study? What is the end of it?' was 
the word of the New School of Learning. That was its 
first speech. It was a speech produced with dramatic illus- 
trations, for the purpose of bringing out its significance more 
fully, for the purpose of pointing the inquiry unmistake- 
ably to those ends of learning which the study of the learned 
then had not yet comprehended. It is a speech on behalf 
of a new learning, in which the extant learning is produced 
on the stage, in its actual historical relation to those 'ends' 



EXTRACTS FROM RALEIGH'S LIFE. lxXXVli 

which the new school conceived to be the true ends of it, 
which are brought on to the stage in palpable, visible re- 
presentation, not in allegorical forms, but in instances, 
' conspicuous instances,' living specimens, after the manner of 
this school. 

' What is the end of study?' cried the setter forth of this 
new doctrine, as long before as when lore and love were 
debating it together in that ' little Academe' that was yet, 
indeed, to be ' the wonder of the world, still and contem- 
plative in living art.' 'What is the end of study?' cries 
already the voice of one pacing under these new olives. That 
was the word of the new school; that was the word of new 
ages, and these new minds taught of nature — her priests and 
prophets knew it then, already, ' Let fame that all hunt after 
in their lives,' they cry — 

Live registered upon our brazen tombs, 

And then grace us in the disgrace of death ; 

"When spite of cormorant devouring time, 

The endeavour of this present breath may buy 

That honour which shall bate his scythe's keen edge, 

And make us heirs of all eternity — [of all]. 

* # * * 

Navarre shall be the wonder of the world, 
Our Court shall be a little Academe, 
Still and contemplative in — living art . 

This is the Poet of the Woods who is beginning his f recrea- 
tions' for us here — the poet who loves so well to take his 
court gallants in their silks and velvets, and perfumes, and 
fine court ladies with all their courtly airs and graces, and all 
the stale conventionalities that he is sick of, out from under 
the low roofs of princes into that great palace in which the 
Queen, whose service he is sworn to, keeps the State. This 
is the school-master who takes his school all out on holiday 
excursions into green fields, and woods, and treats them to 
country merry-makings, and not in sport merely. This is the 
one that breaks open the cloister, and the close walls that 
learning had dwelt in till then, and shuts up the musty books, 



lxxxviii INTRODUCTION. 

and bids that old droning cease. This is the one that stretches 
the long drawn aisle and lifts the fretted vault into a grander 
temple. The Court with all its pomp and retinue, the school 
with all its pedantries and brazen ignorance, ' High Art' with 
its new graces, divinity, Mar-texts and all, must ' come hither, 
come hither,' and ' under the green- wood tree lie with me/ the 
ding-dong of this philosopher's new learning says, calling his 
new school together. This is the linguist that will find ' tongues 
in trees,' and crowd out from the halls of learning the lore of 
ancient parchments with their verdant classics, their ' truth in 
beauty dyed.' This is the teacher with whose new alphabet 
you can find ' sermons in stones, books in the running brooks/ 
and good, — good — his ' good,' the good of the Xew School, 
that broader ' good' in every thing. ' The roof of this court is 
too high to be yours,' says the princess of this out-door scene 
to the sovereignty that claimed it then. 

This is ' great Nature's' Poet and Interpreter, and he takes 
us always into ' the continent of nature'; but man is his chief 
end, and that island which his life makes in the universal 
being is the point to which that Naturalist brings home all his 
new collections. This is the Poet of the Woods, but man, — 
man at the summit of his arts, in the perfection of his refine- 
ments, is always the creature that he is ' collecting* in them. 
In his wildest glades, this is still the species that he is busied 
with. He has brought him there to experiment on him, and 
that we may see the better what he is. He has brought him 
there to improve his arts, to reduce his conventional savage- 
ness, to re-refine his coarse refinements, not to make a wild- 
man of him. This is the Poet of the Woods; but he is a 
woodman, he carries an axe on his shoulder. He will wake a 
continental forest with it and subdue it, and fill it with his 
music. 

For this is the Poet who cries f Westward Ho ! ' But he 
has not got into the woods yet in this play. He is only on 
the edge of them as yet. It is under the blue roof of that 
same dome which is ' too high,' the princess here says, to be- 
long to the pigmy that this Philosopher likes so well to 



EXTRACTS FROM RALEIGH'S LIFE. lxxxix 

bring out and to measure under that canopy — it is ( out 
of doors' that this new speech on behalf of a new learn- 
ing is spoken. But there is a close rim of conventionalities 
about us still. It is a Park that this audacious proposal 
is uttered in. But nothing can be more orderly, for it is 
' a Park with a Palace in it.' There it is, in the back- 
ground. If it were the Attic proscenium itself hollowed into 
the south-east corner of the Acropolis, what more could one 
ask. But it is the palace of the King of — Navarre, who is 
the prince of good fellows and the prince of good learning at 
one and the same time, which makes, in this case, the novelty. 
'A Park with a Palace in it' makes the first scene. ' Another 
part of the same' with the pavilion of a princess and the tents 
of her Court seen in the distance, makes the second ; and the 
change from one part of this park to another, though we get 
into the heart of it sometimes, is the utmost license that the 
rigours of the Greek Drama permit the Poet to think of at 
present. This criticism on the old learning, this audacious 
proposal for the new, with all the bold dramatic illustration 
with which it is enforced, must be managed here under these 
restrictions. Whatever ' persons ' the plot of this drama may 
require for its evolutions, whatever witnesses and reporters 
the trial and conviction of the old learning, and the definition 
of the ground of the new, may require, will have to be in- 
duced to cross this park at this particular time, because the 
form of the new art is not yet emancipated, and the Muse of 
the Inductive Science cannot stir from the spot to search 
them out. 

However, that does not impair the representation as it is 
managed. There is a very bold artist here already, with all 
his deference for the antique. We shall be sure to have all 
when he is the plotter. The action of this drama is not com- 
plicated. The persons of it are few; the characterization is 
feeble, compared with that of some of the later plays; but 
that does not hinder or limit the design, and it is all the more 
apparent for this artistic poverty, anatomically clear; while as 
yet that perfection of art in which all trace of the structure 



XC INTRODUCTION. 

came so soon to be lost in the beauty of the illustration, is 
yet wanting; while as yet that art which made of its living 
instance an intenser life, or which made with its living art a 
life more living than life itself, was only germinating. 

The illustration here, indeed, approaches the allegorical form, 
in the obtrusive, untempered predominance of the qualities 
represented, so overdone as to wear the air of a caricature, 
though the historical combination is still here. These dia- 
grams are alive evidently; they are men, and not allegorical 
spectres, or toys, though they are ' painted in character.' 

The entire representation of the extant learning is drama- 
tically produced on this stage ; the germ of the ' new ' is here 
also; and the unoccupied ground of it is marked out here as, 
in the Advancement of Learning, by the criticism on the 
deficiences of that which has the field. Here, too, the line of 
the extant culture, — the narrow indented boundary of the 
culture that professed to take all is always defining the new, — 
cutting out the wild not yet visited by the art of man; — only 
here the criticism is much more lively, because here ' we come 
to particulars] a thing which the new philosophy much insists 
on; and though this want in learning, and the wildness it 
leaves, is that which makes tragedies in this method of ex- 
hibition ; it has its comical aspect also ; and this is the laughing 
and weeping philosopher in one who manages these repre- 
sentations; and in this case it is the comical aspect of the 
subject that is seized on. 

Our diagrams are still coarse here, but they have already 
the good scientific quality of exhausting the subject. It is 
the New School that occupies the centre of the piece. Their 
quarters are in that palace, but the kiny of it is the Royalty 
(Raleigh) that founded and endowed this School — that was one 
of his secret titles, — and under that name he may sometimes 
be recognized in descriptions and dedications that persons who 
were not in the secret of the School naturally applied in 
another quarter, or appropriated to themselves. 'Rex was a 
surname among the Romans,' says the Interpreter of this 
School, in a very explanatory passage, 'as well as King is 



EXTRACTS FROM RALEIGH'S LIFE. XC1 

with us.' It is the New School that is under these boughs 
here, but hardly that as yet. 

It is rather the representation of the new classical learning, 
— the old learning newly revived, — in which the new is 
germinating. It is that learning in its first effect on the 
young, enthusiastic, but earnest practical English mind. It 
is that revival of the old learning, arrested, daguerreotyped 
at the moment in which the new begins to stir in it, in minds 
which are going to be the master-minds of ages. 

' Common sense ' is the word here already. ' Common 
sense ' is the word that this new Academe is convulsed with 
when the curtain rises. And though it is laughter that you 
hear there now, sending its merry English peals through 
those musty, antique walls, as the first ray of that new beam 
enters them ; the muse of the new mysteries has also another 
mask, and if you will wait a little, you shall hear that tone 
too. Cries that the old mysteries never caught, lamentations 
for Adonis not heard before, griefs that Dionysus never knew, 
shall yet ring out from those walls. 

Under that classic dome which still calls itself Platonic, the 
questions and experiments of the new learning are beginning. 
These youths are here to represent the new philosophy, which 
is science, in the act of taking its first step. The subject is 
presented here in large masses. But this central group, at 
least, is composed of living men, and not dramatic shadows 
merely. There are good historical features peering through 
those masks a little. These youths are full of youthful 
enthusiasm, and aspiring to the ideal heights of learning in 
their enthusiasm. But already the practical bias of their 
genius betrays itself. They are making a practical experi- 
ment with the classics, and to their surprise do not find them 
' good for life.' 

Here is the School, then, — with the classics on trial in the 
persons of these new school-men. That is the central group. 
What more do we want? Here is the new and the old 
already. But this is the old revived — newly revived ; — this 
is the revival of learning in whose stimulus the new is begin- 



XC11 INTRODUCTION. 

ning. There is something in the field besides that. There is 
a ' school-master abroad ' yet, that has not been examined. 
These young men who have resolved themselves in their secret 
sittings into a committee of the whole, are going to have him 
up. He will be obliged to come into this park here, and 
speak his speech in the ear of that English ' common sense,' 
which is meddling here, for the first time, in a comprehensive 
manner with things in general; he will have to ' speak out loud 
and plain/ that these English parents who are sitting here in 
the theatre, some of ' the wiser sort ' of them, at least, may 
get some hint of what it is that this pedagogue is beating into 
their children's brains, taking so much of their glorious youth 
from them — that priceless wealth of nature which none can 
restore to them, — as the purchase. But this is not all. There 
is a man who teaches the grown-up children of the parish in 
which this Park is situated, who happens to live hard by, — 
a man who professes the care and cure of minds. He, too, 
has had a summons sent him; there will be no excuse taken; 
and his examination will proceed at the same time. These 
two will come into the Park together; and perhaps we shall 
not be able to detect any very marked difference in their 
modes of expressing themselves. They are two ordinary, 
quiet-looking personages enough. There is nothing remark- 
able in their appearance; their coming here is not forced. 
There are deer in this Park; and ' book-men' as they are, they 
have a taste for sport also it seems. Unless you should get a 
glimpse of the type, — of the unit in their faces — and that 
shadowy train that the cipher points to, — unless you should 
observe that their speech is somewhat strongly pronounced for 
an individual representation — merely glancing at them in 
passing — you would not, perhaps, suspect who they are. 
And yet the hints are not wanting; they are very thickly 
strewn, — the hints which tell you that in these two men all 
the extant learning, which is in places of trust and authority, 
is represented ; all that is not included in that elegant learning 
which those students are making sport of in those ' golden 
books ' of theirs, under the trees here now. 



EXTRACTS FROM RALEIGH'S LIFE. Xciii 

But there is another department of art and literature which 
is put down as a department of * learning I and a most grave 
and momentous department of it too, in that new scheme of 
learning which this play is illustrating, — one which will also 
have to be impersonated in this representation, — one which 
plays a most important part in the history of this School. It 
is that which gives it the 'power it lacks and wants, and in one 
way or another will have. It is that which makes an arm for 
it, and a long one. It is that which supplies its hidden arms 
and armour. But neither is this department of learning as it 
is extant, — as this School finds it prepared to its hands, 
going to be permitted to escape the searching of this compre- 
hensive satire. There is a ' refined traveller of Spain' haunting 
the purlieus of this Court, who is just the bombastic kind of 
person that is wanted to act this part. For this impersonation, 
too, is historical. There are just such creatures in nature as 
this. We see them now and then; or, at least, he is not 
much overdone, — ' this child of Fancy, — Don Armado 
hight/ It is the Old Eomance, with his ballads and alle- 
gories, — with his old 'lies' and his new arts, — that this 
company are going to use for their new minstrelsy; but first 
they will laugh him out of his bombast and nonsense, and 
instruct him in the knowledge of ' common things,' and teach 
him how to make poetry out of them. They have him here 
now, to make sport of him with the rest. It is the fashionable 
literature, — the literature that entertains a court, — the lite- 
rature of a tyranny, with his gross servility, with his courtly 
affectations, with his arts of amusement, his ' vain delights,' 
with his euphuisms, his ' fire-new words,' it is the polite learn- 
ing, the Elizabethan Belles Lettres, that is brought in here, 
along with that old Dryasdust Scholasticism, which the other 
two represent, to make up this company. These critics, who 
turn the laugh upon themselves, who caricature their own 
follies for the benefit of learning, who make themselves and 
their own failures the centre of the comedy of Loves Labour's 
Lost, are not going to let this thing escape ; with the heights 
of its ideal, and the grossness of its real, it is the very fuel for 
the mirth that is blazing and crackling here. For these are 



XC1V INTRODUCTION. 

the woodmen that are at work here, making sport as they 
work; hewing down the old decaying trunks, gathering all 
the nonsense into heaps, and burning it up and and clearing 
the ground for the new. 

f What is the end of study,' is the word of this Play. To 
get the old books shut, but not till they have been examined, 
not till all the good in them has been taken out, not till we 
have made a stand on them; to get the old books in their 
places, under our feet, and ' then to make progression' after 
we see where we are, is the proposal here — here also. It is 
the shutting up of the old books, and the opening of the new 
ones, which is the business here. But that — that is not the 
proposal of an ignorant man (as this Poet himself takes pains 
to observe) ; it is not the proposition of a man who does not 
know what there is in books — who does not know but there 
is every thing in them that they claim to have in them, every 
thing that is good for life, magic and all. An ignorant man 
is in awe of books, on account of his ignorance. He thinks 
there are all sorts of things in them. He is very diffident 
when it comes to any question in regard to them. He tells 
you that he is not ' high learned,' and defers to his betters. 
Neither is this the proposition of a man who has read a little, 
who has only a smattering in books, as the Poet himself ob- 
serves. It is the proposition of a scholar, who has read them 
all, or had them read for him and examined, who knows what 
is in them all, and what they are good for, and what they are 
not good for. This is the man who laughs at learning, and 
borrows her own speech to laugh her down with. This, and 
not the ignorant man, it is who opens at last ' great nature's' 
gate to us, and tells us to come out and learn of her, because 
that which old books did not e clasp in,' that which old phi- 
losophies have ' not dreamt of,' — the lore of laws not written 
yet in books of man's devising, the lore of that of which man's 
ordinary life consisteth is here, uncollected, waiting to be spelt 
out. 

King. How well he's read to reason against reading. 
is the inference here. 

Dumain. Proceeded well to stop all good proceeding. 



EXTRACTS FROM RALEIGH'S LIFE. XCV 

It is progress that is proposed here also. After the survey of 
learning ' has been well taken, then to make progression! is the 
word. It is not the doctrine of unlearning that is taught here 
in this satire. It is a learning that includes all the extant wis- 
dom, and finds it insufficient. It is one that requires a new and 
nobler study for its god-like ends. But, at the same time, the 
hindrances that a practical learning has to encounter are pointed 
at from the first. The fact, that the true ends of learning 
take us at once into the ground of the forbidden questions, is 
as plainly stated in the opening speech of the New Academy 
as the nature of the statement will permit. The fact, that the 
intellect is trained to vain delights under such conditions, be- 
cause there is no earnest legitimate occupation of it permitted, 
is a fact that is glanced at here, as it is in other places, though 
not in such a manner, of course, as to lead to a ' question' 
from the government in regard to the meaning of the passages 
in which these grievances are referred to. Under these em- 
barrassments it is, we are given to understand, however, that 
the criticism on the old learning and the plot for the new is 
about to proceed. 

Here it takes the form of comedy and broad farce. There 
is a touch of ' tart Aristophanes' in the representation here. 
This is the introductory performance of the school in which 
the student hopes for high words howsoever low the matter, em- 
phasizing that hope with an allusion to the heights of learning, 
as he finds it, and the highest word of it, which seems irre- 
verent, until we find from the whole purport of the play how 
far he at least is from taking it in vain, whatever implication 
of that sort his criticism may be intended to leave on others, 
who use good words with so much iteration and to so little 
purpose. ' That is a high hope for a low having' is the re- 
joinder of that associate of his, whose views on this point 
agree with his own so entirely. It is the height of the hope 
and the lowness of the having — it is the height of the words 
and the lowness of the matter, that makes the incongruity 
here. That is the soul of all the mirth that is stirring here. 
It is the height of ' the style' that - gives us cause to climb in the 



XCV1 INTRODUCTION. 

merriment' that makes the subject of this essay. It is litera- 
ture in general that is laughed at here, and the branches of it 
in particular. It is the old books that are walking about 
under these trees, with their follies all ravelled out, making 
sport for us. 

But this is not all. It is the defect in learning which is 
represented here — that same ' defect' which a graver work of 
this Academy reports, in connection with a proposition for the 
Advancement of Learning — for its advancement into the 
fields not yet taken up, and which turn out, upon inquiry, to 
be the fields of human life and practice; — it is that main 
defect which is represented here. ' I find a kind of science of 
' words' but none of ' things,' ' says the reporter. ' What do 
you read, my lord?' ' Words, words, words,' echoes the 
Prince of Denmark. c I find in these antique books, in these 
Philosophies and Poems, a certain resplendent or lustrous 
mass of matter chosen to give glory either to the subtilty of 
disputations, or to the eloquence of discourses,' says the other 
and graver reporter; 'but as to the ordinary and common 
matter of which life consisteth, I do not find it erected into an 
art or science, or reduced to written inquiry.' ' How low 
soever the matter, / hope in God for high words/ says a 
speaker, who comes out of that same palace of learning on to 
this stage with the secret badge of the new lore on him, which 
is the lore of practice — a speaker not less grave, though he 
comes in now in the garb of this pantomime, to make sport 
for us with his news of learning. For ' Seneca cannot be too 
heavy, nor Plautus too light for the law of writ and the liberty.' 

It is the high words and the low having that make the in- 
congruity. But we cannot see the vanity of those heights of 
words, till the lowness of the matter which they profess to 
abstract has been brought into contrast with them, till the 
particulars which they do not grasp, which they can not com- 
pel, have been brought into studious contrast with them. The 
delicate graces of those flowery summits of speech which the 
ideal nature, when it energises in speech, creates, must over- 
hang in this design the rude actuality which the untrained 



EXTRACTS FROM RALEIGH S LIFE. XCV11 

nature in man, forgotten of art, is always producing. And it 
is the might of nature in this opposition, it is the force of 
' matter,' it is the unconquerable cause contrasted with the 
vanity of the words that have not comprehended the cause, 
it is the futility of these heights of words that are not 'forms' 
that do not correspond to things which must be exhibited 
here also. It is the force of the law in nature, that must be 
brought into opposition here with the height of the word, the 
ideal word, the higher, but not yet scientifically abstracted word, 
that seeks in vain because it has no ' grappling-hook ' on the 
actuality, to bind it. There already are the heights of learning 
as it is, as this school finds it, dramatically exhibited on the 
one hand ; but this, too, — life as it is, — as this school finds it, 
man's life as it is, unreduced to order by his philosophy, un- 
reduced to melody by his verse, must also be dramatically 
exhibited on the other hand, must also be impersonated. It 
is life that we have here, the 'theoric' on the one side, the 
1 practic' on the other. The height of the books on the one 
side, the lowness, the unvisited, ' unlettered ' lowness of the 
life on the other. That which exhibits the defect in learning 
that the new learning is to remedy, the new uncultured, un- 
broken ground of science must be exhibited here also. But 
that is man's life. That is the world. And what if it be? 
There are diagrams in this theatre large enough for that. It 
is the theatre of the New Academy which deals also in ideas, 
but prefers the solidarities. The wardrobe and other pro- 
perties of this theatre are specially adapted to exigencies of 
this kind. The art that put the extant learning with those 
few strokes into the grotesque forms you see there, will not be 
stopped on this side either, for any law of writ or want of 
space and artistic comprehension. This is the learning that 
can be bounded in the nut-shell of an aphorism and include 
all in its bounds. 

There are not many persons here, and they are ordinary 
looking persons enough. But if you lift those dominos a 
little, which that ' refined traveller of Spain ' has brought in 
fashion, you will find that this rustic garb and these homely 

9 



XCVlll INTRODUCTION. 

country features hide more than they promised; and the prin- 
cess, with her train, who is keeping state in the tents yonder, 
though there is an historical portrait there too, is greater than 
she seems. This Antony Dull is a poor rude fellow ; but he is 
a great man in this play. This is the play in which one 
asks ' Which is the princess?' and the answer is, ' The tallest 
and the thickest.' Antony is the thickest, he is the acknow- 
ledged sovereign here in this school ; for he is of that greater 
part that carries it, and though he hath never fed of the 
dainties bred in a book, these spectacles which the new ' book 
men ' are getting up here are intended chiefly for him. And 
that ' unlettered small knowing soul 'Me' — 'still me'' — in- 
significant as you think him when you see him in the form of 
a country swain, is a person of most extensive domains and 
occupations, and of the very highest dignity, as this philosophy 
will demonstrate in various ways, under various symbols. You 
will have that same me in the form of a Mountain, before you 
have read all the books of this school, and mastered all its 
' tokens 1 and ' symbols." 

The dramatic representation here is meagre; but we shall 
find upon inquiry it is already the Globe Theatre, with all its new 
solidarities, new in philosophy, new in poetry, that the leaves 
of this park hide — this park that the doors and windows of the 
New Academe open into — these new grounds that it lets out 
its students to play and study in, and collect their specimens 
from — ' still and contemplative in living art.' It was all the 
world that was going through that park that day haply, we 
shall find. It is all the world that we get in this narrow 
representation here, as we get it in a more limited representa- 
tion still, in another place. ' All the world knows me in my 
book and my book in me,' cries the Egotist of the Mountain. 
It is the first Canto of that great Epic, whose argument runs 
through so many books, that is chaunted here. It is the war, 
the unsuccessful war of lore and nature, whose lost fields have 
made man's life, that is getting reviewed at last and reduced 
to speech and writing. It is the school itself that makes the 
centre of the plot in this case; these gay young philosophers 



EXTRACTS FROM RALEIGH'S LIFE. Xc'lX 

with ' the ribands' yet floating in their 'cap of youth,' who 
oppose lore to love, who ' war against their axon affections and 

THE HUGE ARMY OF THE AVORLD'S DESIRES,' ere they know 

what they are; who think to conquer nature's potencies, her 
universal powers and causes, with wordy ignorance, with 
resolutions that ignore them simply, and make a virtue of 
ignoring them, these are the chief actors here, who come out 
of that classic tiring house where they have been shut up 
with the ancients so long, to celebrate on this green plot, 
which is life, their own defeat, and propose a better wisdom, 
the wisdom of the moderns. And Holofernes, the school- 
master, who cultivates minds, and Sir Nathaniel, the curate, 
who cures them, and Don Armado or Don Adramadio, from 
the flowery heights of the new Belles Lettres, with the last 
refinement of Euphuism on his lips, and Antony Dull, and 
the country damsel and her swain, and the princess and her 
attendants, are all there to eke out and complete the philo- 
sophic design, — to exhibit the extant learning in its airy 
flights and gross descents, in its ludicrous attempt to escape 
from those particulars or to grapple, without loss of grandeur, 
those particulars of which man's life consisteth. It is the 
vain pretension and assumption of those faulty wordy abstrac- 
tions, whose falseness and failure in practice this school is 
going to expose elsewhere; it is the defect of those abstrac- 
tions and idealisms that the Novum Organum was invented to 
remedy, which is exhibited so grossly and palpably here. It 
is the height of those great swelling words of rhetoric and 
logic, in rude contrast with those actualities which the history 
of man is always exhibiting, which the universal nature in 
man is always imposing on the learned and unlearned, the 
profane and the reverend, the courtier and the clown, the 
' king and the beggar,' the actualities which the natural his- 
tory of man continues perseveringly to exhibit, in the face of 
those logical abstractions and those ideal schemes of man as he 
should be, which had been till this time the fruit of learning; 
— those actualities, those particulars, whose lowness the new 

9* 



C INTRODUCTION. 

philosophy would begin with, which the new philosophy 
would erect into an art or science. 

The foundation of this ascent is natural history. There 
must be nothing omitted here, or the stairs would be unsafe. 
The rule in this School, as stated by the Interpreter in Chief, 
is, * that there be nothing in the globe of matter, which should 
not be likewise in the globe of crystal or form;' that is, he 
explains, ' that there should not be anything in being and 
action, which should not be drawn and collected into contem- 
plation and doctrine. 1 The lowness of matter, all the capabili- 
ties and actualities of speech and action, not of the refined 
only, but of the vulgar and profane, are included in the 
science which contemplates an historical result, and which 
proposes the reform of these actualities, the cure of these 
maladies, — which comprehends man as man in its intention, 
— which makes the Common Weal its end. 

Science is the word that unlocks the books of this School, its 
gravest and its lightest, its books of loquacious prose and stately 
allegory, and its Book of Sports and Riddles. Science is the 
clue that still threads them, that never breaks, in all their 
departures from the decorums of literature, in their lowest 
descents from the refinements of society. The vulgarity is not 
the vulgarity of the vulgar — the inelegancy is not the spon- 
taneous rudeness of the ill-bred — any more than its doctrine of 
nature is the doctrine of the unlearned. The loftiest refine- 
ments of letters, the courtliest breeding, the most exquisite 
conventionalities, the most regal dignities of nature, are always 
present in these works, to measure these abysses, flowering to 
their brink. Man as he is, booked, surveyed, — surveyed 
from the continent of nature, put down as he is in her book 
of kinds, not as he is from his own interior isolated concep- 
tions only, — the universal powers and causes as they are 
developed in him, in his untaught affections, in his utmost 
sensuous darkness, — the universal principle instanced where 
it is most buried, the cause in nature found; — man as he is, 
in his heights and in his depths, ' from his lowest note to the 
top of his key/ — man in his possibilities, in his actualities, in 



EXTRACTS FROM RALEIGH'S LIFE. CI 

his thought, in his speech, in his book language, and in his 
every-day words, in his loftiest lyric tongue, in his lowest pit 
of play-house degradation, searched out, explained, interpreted. 
That is the key to the books of this Academe, who carry 
always on their armour, visible to those who have learned 
their secret, but hid under the symbol of their double wor- 
ship, the device of the Hunters, — the symbol of the twin-gods, 
— the silver bow, or the bow that finds all. ' Seeing that she 
beareth two persons .... I do also otherwise shadow her.' 

It is man's life, and the culture of it, erected into an art 
or science, that these books contain. In the lowness of the 
lowest, and in the aspiration of the noblest, the powers whose 
entire history must make the basis of a successful morality and 
policy are found. It is all abstracted or drawn into contem- 
plation, ' that the precepts of cure and culture may be more 
rightly concluded.' ' For that which in speculative philosophy 
corresponds to the cause, in practical philosophy becomes the 
rule/ 

It is not necessary to illustrate this criticism in this case, 
because in this case the design looks through the execution 
everywhere. The criticism of the Novum Organum, the 
criticism of the Advancement of Learning, and the criticism 
of Kaleigh's History of the World, than which there is none 
finer, when once you penetrate its crust of profound erudition, 
is here on the surface. And the scholasticism is not more 
obtrusive here, the learned sock is not more ostentatiously 
paraded, than in some critical places in those performances; 
while the humour that underlies the erudition issues from a 
depth of learning not less profound. 

As, for instance, in this burlesque of the descent of 
Euphuism to the prosaic detail of the human conditions, not then 
accommodated with a style in literature, a defect in learning 
which this Academy proposed to remedy. A new department 
in literature which began with a series of papers issued from 
this establishment, has since undertaken to cover the ground 
here indicated, the every-day human life, and reduce it to 
written inquiry, notwithstanding ' the lowness of the matter.' 



cii INTRODUCTION. 

Letter from Don Armado to the King. 

King [reads]. 'Great deputy, the welkin's vicegerent, and sole 
dominator of Navarre, my soul's earth's god, and body's fostering 
patron . ... So it is, — besieged with sable-coloured melan- 
choly, I did commend the black, oppressing humour to the most 
wholesome physick of thy health-giving air, and, as I am a gentleman, 
betook myself to walk. The time when 1 About the sixth hour : 
when beasts most graze, birds best peck, and men sit down to that 
nourishment which is called supper.' 

[No one who is much acquainted with the style of the 
author of this letter ought to have any difficulty in identi- 
fying him here. There was a method of dramatic compo- 
sition in use then, and not in this dramatic company only, 
which produced an amalgamation of styles. ' On a forgotten 
matter,' these associated authors themselves, perhaps, could 
not always ' make distinction of their hands/ But there are 
places where Kaleigh's share in this ' cry of players ' shows 
through very palpably]. 

' So much for the time when. Now for the ground which ; which 
I mean I walked upon : it is ycleped thy park. Then for the place 
where ; where I mean I did encounter that obscene and most pre- 
posterous event, that draweth from my snow-white pen the ebon- 
coloured ink, which here thou beholdest, surveyest, or seest, etc. . . . 

'Thine in all compliments of devoted and heart-burning heat of 
duty. 

'Don Adriano de Armado.' 

And in another letter from the same source, the dramatic 
criticism on that style of literature which it was the intention 
of this School ' to reform altogether ' is thus continued. 



'o v 



. . . 'The magnanimous and most illustrate Bang Cophelua, 
set eye upon the pernicious and indubitate beggar Zenelophon. And 
it was he that might rightly say, Veni, vidi, vici ; which to anatomise 
in the vulgar, (O base and obscure vulgar!) Videlicet, he came, saw, 
and overcame . . . Who came 1 the king. Why did he come ? to 
see. Why did he see 1 to overcome. To whom came he ? to the 
beggar. What saw he ? the beggar. Who overcame he ? the beggar. 
The conclusion is victory. On whose side 1 etc. 

' Thine in the dearest design of industry.' 



EXTRACTS FROM RALEIGH S LIFE. Clll 

[Dramatic comment."] 

Boyet. 1 am much deceived but I remember the style. 
Princess. Else your memory is bad going o'er it erewhile. 

Jaquenetta. Good Master Parson, be so good as to read me this 
letter — it was sent me from Don Armatho : I beseech you to read it. 

Holofernes. [Speaking here, however, not in character but for ' the 
Academe.''] Fauste precor gelida quando pecus omne sub umbra 

Rum mat, and so forth. Ah, good old Mantuan ! I may speak 
of thee as the traveller doth of Venice 

■ Vinegia, Vinegia, 

Chi non te vede, ei non te pregia. 

Old Mantuan ! Old Mantuan ! Who understandeth thee not, loves thee 
not. — Ut re sol la mi fa. — Under pardon, Sir, what are the contents? 
or, rather, as Horace says in his What, my soul, verses 1 

Nath. Ay, Sir, and very learned [one would say so upon exami- 
nation]. 

Hoi. Let me have a staff, a stanza, a verse ; Lege Domine. 

Nath. [Eeads the 'verses.'] — ' If love make me forsworn,' etc. 

Hoi. You find not the apostrophe, and so — miss the accent — [criticising 
the reading. It is necessary to find the apostrophe in the verses of this 
Academy, before you can give the accent correctly ; there are other 
points which require to be noted also, in this refined courtier's writings, 
as this criticism will inform us]. Let me supervise the canzonet. Here 
are only numbers ratified, but for the elegancy, facility, and golden 
cadency of poesy, caret. Ovidius Naso was the man. And why, indeed, 
Naso ; but for smelling out the odoriferous flowers of fancy, the jerks of 
invention. Imitari is nothing ; so doth the hound his master, the ape 
his keeper, the tired horse his rider. [It was no such reading and 
writing as that which this Academy was going to countenance, or 
teach]. But, DamoseUa, was this directed to you ? 

Jaq. Ay, Sir, from one Monsieur Biron, one of the strange queen's 
lords. 

Hoi. I mil over-glance the super-script. ' To the snow white hand of 
the most beauteous lady Rosaline! I will look again on the intellect of 
the letter for the nomination of the party writing, to the person 
written unto {Rosaline). — [Look again. — That is the rule for the reading 
of letters issued from this Academy, whether they come in Don Ar- 
mado's name or another's, when the point is not to ' miss the accent'] 
' Your ladyship's, in all desired employment, Biron.' Sir Nathaniel, 
this Biron is one of the votaries with the king, and here he hath 
framed a letter to a sequent of the stranger queen's, which, accidentally 
or by way of progression, hath miscarried. Trip and go, my sweet • 
deliver this paper into the royal hand of the king. Lt may concern 
much. Stay not thy compliment, I forgive thy duty. Adieu. 



civ INTRODUCTION. 

Nath. Sir, you have done this in the fear of God, very religiously ; 
and as a certain father saith — 

Hoi. Sir, tell me not of the father, I do fear colorable colors. But 
to return to the verses. Did they please you, Sir Nathaniel ? 

Nath. Marvellous well for the pen. 

Hoi. I dine to-day at the father's of a certain pupil of mine, where, 
if before repast, it shall please you to gratify the table with a grace, I 
will, on my privilege I have with the parent of the foresaid child, or 
pupil, undertake your ben venuto, where I will prove those verses to be 
very unlearned, neither savouring of poetry, wit, nor invention. I 
beseech your society. 

Nath. And thank you, too ; for society (saith the text) is the happi- 
ness of LIFE. 

Hoi. And, certes, the text most infallibly concludes it. — Sir, [to 
Dull] I do invite you too, [to hear the verses ex-criticised] you shall not 
say me nay : pauca verba. Away ; the gentles are at their games, and 
we will to our recreation. 

Another part of the same. After dinner. 
Re-enter Holofemes, Sir Nathaniel, and Dull. 

Hoi. Satis quod sufjicit. 

Nath. I praise God for you, Sir : your reasons at dinner have been 
sharp and sententious ; pleasant without scurrility, witty without affec- 
tion, audacious without impudency, learned without opinion, and 
strange without heresy. I did converse this quondam day with a com- 
panion of the king's, who is intituled, nominated, or called Don Adriano 
de Armado. 

Hoi. Novi hominem tanquam te. His manner is lofty, his discourse 
peremptory, his tongue filed, his eye ambitious, and his general be- 
haviour, vain, ridiculous and thrasonical. He is too picked, too spruce, 
too affected, too odd, and, as it were, too peregrinate, as I may call it. 

Nath. A most singular and choice epithet ! [Takes out his table- 
book.] 

Hoi. He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple 
of his argument, ['More matter with less art,' says the queen in 
Hamlet], I abhor such, fantastical phantasms, such insociable and point 
device companions, such rackers of orthography, as to speak doubt 
fine when he should say doubt, etc. This is abhominable which he 
would call abominable ; it insinuateth me of insanie ; Ne intelligis, 
domine? to make frantic, lunatic. 

Nath. Laus deo bone intelligo. 

Hoi. Bone — bone for bene: Priscian, a little scratched ''twill serve. 
[This was never meant to be printed of course ; all this is understood 
to have been prepared only for a performance in ' a booth.'] 



EXTRACTS FROM RALEIGH'S LIFE. CV 

Enter Armado, etc. 
Nath. Yidesne quis venit 1 
Hoi. Yideo et gaudeo. 
Arm. China ! 
Hoi. Quare Chirra Dot Sirrah ! 

But the first appearance of these two book-men, as Dull takes 
leave them to call them in this scene, is not less to the pur- 
pose. They come in with Antony Dull, who serves as a 
foil to their learning; from the moment that they open their 
lips they speak 'in character/ and they do not proceed far 
before they give us some hints of the author's purpose. 

Nath. Very reverent sport truly, and done in the testimony of a good 
conscience. 

Hoi. The deer was, as you know, in sanguis, ripe as a pomewater, 
who now hangeth like a jewel in the ear of Coelo, the sky, the welkin, the 
heaven, and anon falleth like a crab on the face of terra — the soil, the 
land, the earth. [A-side glance at the heights and depths of the in- 
congruities which are the subject here.] 

Nath. Truly, Master Holofernes, the epithets are sweetly varied, like 
a scholar at the least, but, etc 

Hoi. Most barbarous intimation ! [referring to Antony Dull, who 
has been trying to understand this learned language, and apply it to 
the subject of conversation, but who fails in the attempt, very much 
to the amusement and self-congratulation of these scholars]. Yet a 
kind of insinuation, as it were, in via, in way of explication [a style 
much in use in this school], facere, as it were, replication, or rather 
ostentare, to show, as it were, his inclination, after his undressed, un- 
polished, uneducated, unpruned, untrained, or rather unlettered, or 
ratherest unconfirmed fashion, — to insert again my haud credo for a 
deer. . . . Twice sod simplicity, bis coctus! O thou monster ignorance, 
how deformed dost thou look ! 

Nath. [explaining]. Sir, he hath never fed of the dainties bred in a 
book; he hath not eat paper, as it were; he hath not drunk ink ; his 
intellect is not replenished; he is only an animal — only sensible in the 
duUer parts ; 

And such barren plants are set before us that we thankful should be, 
(Which we of taste and feeling are) for those parts that do fructify 

in us more than he. 
For as it would ill become me to be vain, indiscreet, or a fool, 
So were there a patch set on learning to see him in a school* 

* That would be a new 'school,' a new ' learning,' patching the 'defect? 
(as it would be called elsewhere) in the old. 



cvi INTRODUCTION. 

Dull. You two are book-men. Can you tell me by your wit, etc. 

Nath. A rare talent. 

Dull. If a talent be a claw, look how he claws him with a talent. 

Hoi. This is a gift that I have ; simple, simple ; a foolish extrava- 
gant spirit, full of forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, 
motions, revolutions : But the gift is good in those in whom it is acute, 
and I am thankful for it. 

Nath. Sir, I praise the Lord for you, and so may my parishioners; 
for their sons are well tutored by you, and their daughters profit very 
greatly under you ; you are a good member of the Common-Wealth. 

He is in earnest of course. Is the Poet so too? 

' What is the end of study V — let me know. 

' they have lived long in the alms-basket of WORDS,' is 
the criticism on this learning with which this showman, 
whoever he may be, explains his exhibition of it. And 
surely he must be, indeed, of the school of Antony Dull, and 
never fed with the dainties bred in a book, who does not see 
what it is that is criticised here ; — that it is the learning of 
an unlearned time, of a barbarous time, of a vain, frivolous 
debased, wretched time, that has been fed long — always from 
' the alms-basket of words.' And one who is acquainted already 
with the style of this school, who knows already its secret signs 
and stamp, would not need to be told to look again on the in- 
tellect of the letter for the nomination of the party writing, to 
the person written to, in order to see what source this pastime 
comes from, — what player it is that is behind the scene here. 
' Whoe'er he be, he bears a mounting mind,' and beginning in the 
lowness of the actual, and collecting the principles that are in 
all actualities, the true forms that are forms in nature, and not 
in man's speech only, the new ideas of the New Academy, 
the ideas that are powers, with these ' simples' that are causes, 
he will reconstruct fortuitous conjunctions, he will make his 
poems in facts; he will find his Fairy Land in her kingdom 
whose iron chain he wears. 

' The gentles were at their games/ and the soul of new ages 
was beginning its re-creations. 

For this is but the beginning of that ' Armada' that this 



EXTRACTS FROM RALEIGH'S LIFE. Cvii 

Don Arm ado — who fights with sword and pen, in ambush 
and in the open field — will sweep his old enemy from the seas 
with yet. 

like a book of sports thou 'It read me o'er, 
But there 's more in me than thou 'It understand. 

Look how the father's face 
Lives in his issue ; even so the race 
Of Shake-spear's mind and manners brightly shines 
In his well turned and true filed lines, 
In each of which he seems to shake a lance, 
As brandished in the eyes of — [what ? — ] Ignorance! 

Ben Jonson. 

Ignorance ! — yes, that was the word. 

It is the Prince of that little Academe that sits in the Tower 
here now. It is in the Tower that that little Academe holds 
its 'conferences' now. There is a little knot of men of 
science who contrive to meet there. The associate of Raleigh's 
studies, the partner of his plans and toils for so many years, 
Hariot, too scientific for his age, is one of these. It is in the 
Tower that Raleigh's school is kept now. The English youth, 
the hope of England, follow this teacher still. ' Many young 
gentlemen still resort to him.' Gilbert Harvey is one of this 
school. ' None but my father would keep such a bird in such 
a cage,' cries one of them — that Prince of Wales through 
whom the bloodless revolution was to have been accomplished; 
and a Queen seeks his aid and counsel there still. 

It is in the Tower now that we must look for the sequel of 
that holiday performance of the school. It is the genius that 
had made its game of that old love's labour's lost that is at work 
here still, still bent on making a lore of life and love, still 
ready to spend its rhetoric on things, and composing its metres 
with them. 

Nor shall death brag thou wanderest in his shade, 
When in eternal lines to time thou growest. 

He is building and manning new ships in his triumphant 
fleet. But they are more warlike than they were. The 
papers that this Academe issues now have the stamp of the 
Tower on them. ' The golden shower/ that 'flowed from his 



CVlll INTRODUCTION. 

fruitful head of his love's praise' flows no more. Fierce bitter 
things are flung forth from that retreat of learning, while the 
kingly nature has not yet fully mastered its great wrongs. 
The ' martial hand ' is much used in the compositions of this 
school indeed for a long time afterwards. 

Fitter perhaps to thunder martial stower 
When thee so list thy tuneful thoughts to raise, 

said the partner of his verse long before. 

With rage 
Or influence chide or cheer the drooping stage, 

says his protege. 

It was while this arrested soldier of the human emancipation 
sat amid his books and papers, in old Julius Caesar's Tower, 
or in the Tower of that Conqueror, * commonly so called/ that 
the ' readers of the wiser sort' found, ' thrown in at their study 
windows,'' writings, as if they came ' from several citizens, 
wherein Caesar s ambition was obscurely glanced at,'' and thus 
the whisper of the Roman Brutus ' pieced them out/ 

Brutus thou sleep'st ; awake, and see thyself. 

Shall Rome [soft — 'thtis must I piece it out!~\ 

Shall Rome stand under one marl's awe 1 What Rome ? 



The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, 
But in ourselves that we are underlings. 



Age, thou art shamed. 

It was while he sat there, that the audiences of that player 

who was bringing forth, on ' the banks of Thames/ such 

wondrous things out of his treasury then, first heard the 

Roman foot upon their stage, and the long-stifled, and pent-up 

speech of English freedom, bursting from the old Roman 

patriot's lips. 

Cassius. And let us swear our resolution. 

Brutus. No, not an oath : If not the face of men, 

The sufferance of our soul's, the time's abuse, 

If these be motives weak, break off betimes, 

And every man hence to his idle bed ; 

So let high-sighted tyranny range on, 

Till each man drop by lottery. 



EXTEACTS FROM RALEIGH'S LIFE. cix 

It was while lie sat there, that the player who did not write 
his speeches, said — 

Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass, 
Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron, 
Can be retentive to tbe strength of spirit ; 
If / know this, know all the world beside, 
That part of tyranny that I do bear, 
/ can shake off at pleasure. 

And why should Caesar be a tyrant then ? 
Poor Man! I know he would not be a wolf, 
But that he sees the Romans are but sheep : 
He were no Hon, were not Romans hinds. 



But I, perhaps, speak this 
Before a willing bondman. 



Hamlet. My lord, — you played once in the university, you say ? 

Polonius. That did I, my lord ; and was accounted a good actor. 

Hamlet. And what did you enact 1 

Polonius. I did enact Julius Caesar. I was killed i' the Capitol ; 
Brutus killed me. 

Hamlet. It was a brute part of him to kill so capital a calf there. — 
Be the players ready 1 

Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light. For the law of 
writ, and the liberty. These are the only men. 

Hamlet. Why do you go about to recover the wind of me, as if you 
would drive me into a toil ? 

Guild. O my lord, if my duty be too bold, my love is too un- 
mannerly. 

Hamlet. I do not well understand that. Will you play upon this 
pipe ? 

Guild. My lord, I cannot. 

Hamlet. I pray you. 

Guild. Believe me, I cannot. 

Hamlet. I do beseech you. 

Guild. I know no touch of it, my lord. 

Hamlet. 'Tis as easy as lying. Govern these ventages with your 
fingers and thumb, give it breath with your mouth, and it will discourse 
most eloquent music. Look you, these are the stops. 

Guild. But these cannot I command to any utterance of harmony : I 
have not the skill. 



CX INTRODUCTION. 

Hamlet. Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me 1 
You would play upon me ; you would seem to know my stops ; you 
would pluck out the heart of my mystery ; you would sound me from 
my lowest note to the top of my key ; and there is much music, excel- 
lent voice in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood ! 
do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe ? Call me 
what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play 
upon me. 

Hamlet. Why did you laugh when I said, Man delights not me 1 
Guild. To think, my lord, if you delight not in man, what lenten 
entertainment the players shall receive from you. We coted them on 
the way, and thither are they coming to offer you — service. 



THE. 

PHILOSOPHY 



OF 



THE PLAYS OF SHAKSPERE 

UNFOLDED. 



BOOK r. 
THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 



PART I. 

MICHAEL DE MONTAIGNE'S ' PRIVATE AND 

RETIRED ARTS.' 

And thus do we of wisdom and of reach, 
With windlaces and with assays of bias, 
By indirections, find directions out; 
So by my former lecture and advice, 
Shall you, my son. — Hamlet. 

CHAPTER I. 

ASCENT FROM PARTICULARS ' TO THE HIGHEST PARTS OF 
SCIENCES/ BT THE ENIGMATIC METHOD ILLUSTRATED. 

Single, I'll resolve you. — Tempest. 

Observe his inclination in yourself. — Hamlet. 

For ciphers, they are commonly in letters, but may be in words. 

Advancement of Learning. 

HPHE fact that a Science of Practice, not limited to Physics 
and the Arts based on the knowledge of physical laws, but 
covering the whole ground of the human activity, and limited 
only by the want and faculty of man, required, in the reigns of 
Elizabeth and James the First, some special and profoundly 
artistic methods of ' delivery and tradition,' would not appear 
to need much demonstration to one acquainted with the 
peculiar features of that particular crisis in the history of the 
English nation. 

And certainly any one at all informed in regard to the con- 
dition of the world at the time in which this science, — which 
is the new practical science of the modern ages, — makes its 
first appearance in history, — any one who knows what kind 
of a public opinion, what amount of intelligence in the common 

B 



2 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

mind the very fact of the first appearance of such a science on 
the stage of the human affairs presupposes, — any one who 
will stop to consider what kind of a public it was to which such 
a science had need as yet to address itself, when that engine 
for the diffusion of knowledge, which has been battering the 
ignorance and stupidity of the masses of men ever since, was 
as yet a novel invention, when all the learning of the world 
was still the learning of the cell and the cloister, when the 
practice of the world was still in all departments, unscientific, 
— any one at least who will stop to consider the nature of the 
' preconceptions' which a science that is none other than the 
universal science of practice, must needs encounter in its prin- 
cipal and nobler fields, will hardly need to be told that if pro- 
duced at all under such conditions, it must needs be produced, 
covertly. Who does not know, beforehand, that such a science 
would have to concede virtually, for a time, the whole ground 
of its nobler fields to the preoccupations it found on them, as 
the inevitable condition of its entrance upon the stage of the 
human affairs in any capacity, as the basis of any toleration of 
its claim to dictate to the men of practice in any department 
of their proceedings. 

That that little ' courtly company' of Elizabethan scholars, in 
which this great enterprise for the relief of man's estate was 
supposed in their own time to have had its origin, was com- 
posed of wits and men of learning who were known, in their 
own time, to have concealed their connection with the works 
on which their literary fame chiefly depended — that that 
1 glorious Willy,' who finds these forbidden fields of science all 
open to his pastime, was secretly claimed by this company — 
that a style of f delivery' elaborately enigmatical, borrowed in 
part from the invention of the ancients, and the more recent 
use of the middle ages, but largely modified and expressly 
adapted to this exigency, was employed in the compositions of 
this school, both in prose and verse, a style capable of convey- 
ing not merely a double, but a triple significance; a style so 
capacious in its concealments, so large in its ' cryptic,' as to 
admit without limitation the whole scope of this argument, 



MICHAEL DE MONTAIGNE. 3 

and so involved as to conceal in its involutions, all that was 
then forbidden to appear, — this has been proved in that part of 
the work which contains the historical key to this delivery. 

We have also incontestable historical evidence of the fact, 
that the man who was at the head of this new conjunction in 
speculation and practice in its more immediate historical deve- 
lopments, — the scholar who was most openly concerned in his 
own time in the introduction of those great changes in the 
condition of the world, which date their beginning from this 
time, was himself primarily concerned in the invention of this 
art. That this great political chief, this founder of new 
polities and inventor of new social arts, who was at the same 
time the founder of a new school in philosophy, was under- 
stood in his own time to have found occasion for the use of 
such an art, in his oral as well as in his written communica- 
tions with his school; — that he was connected with a scientific 
association, which was known to have concealed under the 
profession of a curious antiquarian research, an inquiry into 'the 
higher parts of sciences' which the government of that time 
was not disposed to countenance; — that in the opinion of per- 
sons who had the best opportunity of becoming acquainted 
with the facts at the time, this inventor of the art was himself 
beheaded, chiefly on account of the discovery of his use of 
it in one of his gravest literary works ; — all this has been 
produced already, as matter of historic record merely. All 
this remains in the form of detailed cotemporary statement, 
which suffices to convey, if not the fact that the forbidden 
parts of sciences were freely handled in the discussions of this 
school, and not in their secret oral discussions only, but in 
their great published works, — if not that, at least the fact that 
such was the impression and belief of persons living at the 
time, whether any ground existed for it or not. 

But the arts by which these new men of science contrived 
to evade the ignorance and the despotic limitations of their 
time, the inventions with which they worked to such good 
purpose upon their own time, in spite of its restrictions and 
oppositions, and which enable them to ' outstretch their span/ 

b 2 



4 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

and prolong nnrl perpetuate their plan for the advancement of 
their kind, and compel the future ages to work with them to the 
fulfilment of its ends; — the arts by which these great original 
naturalists undertook to transfer in all their unimpaired splen- 
dour and worth, the collections they had made in the nobler 
fields of their science to the ages that would be able to make use 
of them ; — these are the arts that Ave shall have need to 
master, if we would unlock the legacy they have left to us. 

The proof of the existence of this special art of delivery and 
tradition, and the definition of the objects for which it was 
employed, has been derived thus far chiefly from sources of 
evidence exterior to the works themselves; but the inventors 
of it and those who made use of it in their own speech and 
writings, are undoubtedly the persons best qualified to give us 
authentic and lively information on this subject; and we are 
now happily in a position to appreciate the statements which 
they have been at such pains to leave us, for the sake of 
clearing up those parts of their discourse which were neces- 
sarily obscured at the time. Now that we have in our hands 
that key of Times which they have recommended to our use, 
that knowledge of times which 'gives great light in many cases 
to true interpretations,' it is not possible any longer to overlook 
these passages, or to mistake their purport. 

But before we enter upon the doctrine of Art which was 
published in the first great recognized work of this philosophy, 
it will be necessary to produce here some extracts from a book 
which was not originally published in England, or in the 
English language, but one which was brought out here as an 
exotic, though it is in fact one of the great original works of 
this school, and one of its boldest and most successful issues; 
a work in which the new grounds of the actual experience and 
life of men, are not merely inclosed and propounded for written 
inquiry, but openly occupied. This is not the place to explain 
this fact, though the continental relations of this school, and 
other circumstances already referred to in the life of its founder, 
will serve to throw some light upon it; but on account of the 
bolder assertions which the particular form of writing and pub- 



MICHAEJL DE MONTAIGNE. 5 

lication rendered possible in this case, and for the sake also of 
the more lively exhibition of the art itself which accompanies 
and illustrates these assertions in this instance, it appears on the 
whole excusable to commence our study of the special Art for 
the delivery and tradition of knowledge in those departments 
which science was then forbidden on pain of death to enter, 
with that exhibition of it which is contained in this particular 
work, trusting to the progress of the extracts themselves to 
apologize to the intelligent reader for any thing which may 
seem to require explanation in this selection. 

It is only necessary to premise, that tliid work is one of the 
many works of this school, in which a grave, profoundly scien- 
tific design is concealed under the disguise of a gay, popular, 
attractive form of writing, though in this case the audience is 
from the first to a certain extent select. It has no platform 
that takes in — as the plays do, with their more glaring attrac- 
tions and their lower and broader range of inculcation, — the 
populace. There is no pit in this theatre. It is throughout a 
book for men of liberal culture; but it is a book for the world, 
and for men of the world, and not for the cloister merely, and 
the scholar. But this, too, has its differing grades of readers, 
from its outer court of lively pastime and brilliant aimless chat 
to that esoteric chamber, where the abstrusest parts of sciences 
are waiting for those who will accept the clues, and patiently 
ascend to them. 

The work is popular in its form, but it is inwoven through- 
out with a thread of lurking meanings so near the surface, and 
at times so. boldly obtruded, that it is difficult to understand 
how it could ever have been read at all without occasioning 
the inquiry which it was intended to occasion under certain 
conditions, but which it was necessary for this society to ward 
off from their works, except under these limitations, at the 
time when they were issued. For these inner meanings are 
everywhere pointed and emphasized with the most bold and 
vivid illustration, which lies on the surface of the work, in the 
form of stories, often without any apparent relevance in that 
exterior connection — brought in, as it would seem, in mere ca- 



6 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

price or by the loosest threads of association. They lie, with 
the ' allegations' which accompany them, strewn all over the 
surface of the work, like 'trap* on 'sand-stone/ telling their 
story to the scientific eye, and beckoning the philosophic ex- 
plorer to that primeval granite of sciences that their vein will 
surely lead to. But the careless observer, bent on recreation, 
observes only a pleasing feature in the landscape, one that 
breaks happily its threatened dulness ; the reader, reading this 
book as books are wont to be read, finds nothing in this phe- 
nomenon to excite his curiosity. And the author knows him 
and his ways so well, that he is able to foresee that result, and 
is not afraid to trust to it in the case of those whose scrutiny 
he is careful to avoid. For he is one who counts largely on 
the carelessness, or the indifference, or the stupidity of those 
whom he addresses. There is no end to his confidence in that. 
He is perpetually staking his life on it. Neither is he willing 
to trust to the clues which these unexplained stories might seem 
of themselves to offer to the studious eye, to engage the atten- 
tion of the reader — the reader whose attention he is bent on 
securing. Availing himself of one of those nooks of discourse, 
which he is at no loss for the means of creating when the pur- 
pose of his essaie requires it, he beckons the confidential reader 
aside, and thus explains his method to him, outright, in terms 
which admit of but one construction. * Neither these stories,' 
he says, ' nor my allegations do always serve simply for example, 
authority, or ornament ; I do not only regard them for the use 
I make of them; they carry sometimes, besides what I apply 
them to, the seeds of a richer and bolder matter, and some- 
times, collaterally, a more delicate sound, both to me myself, — 
who will say no more about it in this place 1 [we shall hear more 
of it in another place, however, and where the delicate colla- 
teral sounds will not be wanting] — ' both to me myself, and to 
others who happen to be of my ear.' 

To the reader, who does indeed happen to be of his ear, to 
one who has read the « allegations' and stories that he speaks of, 
and the whole work, and the works connected with it, by means 
of that knowledge of the inner intention, and of the method 



MICHAEL DE MONTAIGNE. 7 

to which he alludes, this passage would of course convey no 
new intelligence. But will the reader, to whom the views here 
presented are yet too new to seem credible, endeavour to ima- 
gine or invent for himself any form of words, in which the 
claim already made in regard to the style in which the great 
original writers of this age and the founders of the new science 
of the human life were compelled to infold their doctrine, 
could have been, in the case of this one at least, more distinctly 
asserted. Here is proof that one of them, one who counted 
on an audience too, did find himself compelled to infold his 
richer and bolder meanings in the manner described. All that 
need be claimed at present in regard to the authorship of this 
sentence is, that it is written by one whose writings, in their 
higher intention, have ceased to be understood, for lack of the 
' ear ' to which his bolder and richer meanings are addressed, for 
lack of the ear, to which the collateral and more delicate sounds 
which his words sometimes carry with them are perceptible; 
and that it is written by a philosopher whose learning and aims 
and opinions, down to the slightest points of detail, are abso- 
lutely identical with those of the principal writers of this 
school. 

But let us look at a few of the stories which he ventures to 
introduce so emphatically, selecting only such as can be told 
in a sentence or two. Let us take the next one that follows 
this explanation — the story in the very next paragraph to it. 
The question is apparently of Cicero, of his style, of his vanity, 
of his supposed care for his fame in future ages, of his real 
disposition and objects. 

' Away with that eloquence that so enchants us with its 
harmony, that we should more study it than things' [what new 
soul of philosophy is this, then, already ?] — 'unless you will affirm 
that of Cicero to be of so supreme perfection as to form a body 
of itself. And of him, I shall further add one story we read 
of to this purpose, wherein his nature will much more manifestly 
be laid open to us' [than in that seeming care for his fame 
in future ages, or in that lower object of style, just dismissed 
so scornfully.] 



8 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

' TTe was to make an oration in public, and found himself a 
little straitened in time, to fit his words to his mouth as he had a 
mind to do, when Eros, one of his slaves, brought him word 
that the audience was deferred till the next day, at which he 
was so ravished with joy that he enfranchised him.' 

The word 'time' — here admits of a double rendering 
whereby the authors aims are more manifestly laid open; and 
there is also another word in this sentence which carries a 
' delicate sound ' with it, to those who have met this au- 
thor in other fields, and who happen to be of his counsel. 
But lest the stories of themselves should still seem flat and 
pointless, or trivial and insignificant to the uninstructed ear, it 
may be necessary to interweave them with some further ' alle- 
gations on this subject/ which the author assumes, or appears 
to assume, in his own person. 

' I write my book for few men, and for few years. Had it 
been matter of duration, I should have put it into a better lan- 
guage. According to the continual variation that ours has been 
subject to hitherto [and we know who had a similar view on this 
point], who can expect' that the present form of language should 
be in use fifty years hence. It slips every day through our 
fingers; and since I was born, is altered above one half. We 
say that it is now perfect : every age says the same of the lan- 
guage it speaks. I shall hardly trust to that so long as it runs 
away and changes as it does. 

' 'Tis for good and useful writings to nail and rivet it to 
them, and its reputation will go according to the fortune of our 
state. For which reason, I am not afraid to insert herein several 
private articles, which will spend their use amongst the men now 

living, AND THAT CONCERN THE PARTICULAR KNOWLEDGE 
OF SOME WHO WILL SEE FURTHER INTO THEM THAN THE 

COMMON reader.' But that the inner reading of these pri- 
vate articles — that reading which lay farther in — to which 
he invites the attention of those whom it concerns — was not 
expected to spend its use among the men then living, that which 
follows might seem to imply. It was that wrapping of them, 
it was that gross superscription which ' the fortune of our 



MICHAEL DE MONTAIGNE. 9 

state ' was likely to make obsolete ere long, this author thought, 
as we shall see if we look into his prophecies a little. f I will 
not, after all, as I often hear dead men spoken of, that men 
should say of me : ' He judged, and lived so and SO. Could 
he have spoken when he was dying, he would have said so or 
so. I knew him better than any.' 

' So our virtues 
Lie in the interpretation of the times,' 

says the unfortunate Tullus Aufidius, in the act of conducting 

a Volscian army against the infant Roman state, bemoaning 

himself upon the conditions of his historic whereabouts, and 

beseeching the sympathy and favourable constructions of 

posterity — 

So our virtues 
Lie in the interpretation of the times ; 
And power unto itself most commendable 
Hath not a tomb so evident as a hair 
To extol what it hath done. 

' The times,' says Lord Bacon, speaking in reference to 
books particularly, though he also recommends the same key 
for the reading of lives, 'the times in many cases give great 
light to true interpretations.' 

' Now as much as decency permits/ continues the other, 
anticipating here that speech which he might be supposed to 
have been anxious to make in defence of his posthumous repu- 
tation, could he have spoken when he was dying, and fore- 
stalling that criticism which he foresaw — that odious criticism 
of posterity on the discrepancy between his life and his judg- 
ment — c Now as much as decency permits, I here discover 
my inclinations and affections. If any observe, he will find 
that / have either told or designed to tell all. What I cannot 
express I point out with my finger. 

' There was never greater circumspection and military pru- 
dence than sometimes is seen among US ; can it be that men are 
afraid to lose themselves by the way, that they reserve themselves 
to the end of the game ? ' 



10 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

' There needs no more but to see a man promoted to dignity, 
though we knew him but three days before a man of no mark, 
yet an image of grandeur and ability insensibly steals into our 
opinion, and we persuade ourselves that growing in reputation 
and attendants, he is also increased in merit' : — 

Hamlet. Do the boys carry it away ? 

Eos. Ay, that they do, my lord. Hercules and his load too. 

Hamlet. It is not very strange ; for my uncle is king of Denmark, 
and those that would make mouths at him while my father lived, give 
twenty, forty, fifty, a hundred ducats a-piece for his picture in little. 
'Sblood, there is something in this, more than natural [talking of the super- 
natural], if philosophy could find it out. 

1 But,' our prose philosopher, whose mind • is running 
much on the same subjects, continues ' if it happens so that 
he [this favourite of fortune] falls again, and is mixed with 
the common crowd, every one inquires with wonder into the 
cause of his having been hoisted so high. 7s it he ? say they : 
did he know no more than this when he was in place?' 
[' change places . . . .robes and furred gowns hide all.'] ' Do 
princes satisfy themselves with so little ? Truly we were in good 
hands ! That which I myself adore in kings, is [note it] 
the crowd of the adorers. All reverence and submission is due 
to them, except that of the understanding ; my reason is not to 
bow and bend, 'tis my knees' ' I will not do Y says another, 
who is in this one's counsels, 

I will not do 't 
Lest I surcease to honour mine own truth, 
And by my body's action, teach my mind 
A most inherent baseness. Coriolanus. 

' Antisthenes one day entreated the Athenians to give orders 
that their asses might he employed in tilling the ground, — to 
which it was answered, ' that those animals were not destined to 
such a service.' ' That's all one,' replied he ; 'it only sticks at your 
command ; for the most ignorant and incapable men you 
employ in your commands of war, immediately become worthy 
enough because — you employ them.' 



MICHAEL DE MONTAIGNE. II 

There raightst thou behold the great image of authority. A dog's 
obeyed in office. — Lear. 

For thou dost know, oh Damon dear, 

This realm dismantled was 
Of Jove himself; and now reigns here, 
A very — very — Peacock. 
Horatio. You might have rhymed. Hamlet. 

'to which,' continues this political philosopher, — that is, to 
which preceding anecdote — containing such unflattering in- 
timations with regard to the obstinacy of nature, in the limits 
she has set to the practical abilities of those animals, not 
enlarging their natural gifts out of respect to the Athenian 
selection (an anecdote which supplies a rhyme to Hamlet's verse, 
and to many others from the same source) — ' to which the custom 
of so many people, who canonize the kings they have chosen out 
of their oivn body, and are not content only to honour, but 
adore them, comes very near. Those of Mexico [for instance, 
it would not of course do to take any nearer home], after the 
ceremonies of their king's coronation are finished, dare no more 
look him in the face ; but, as if they deified him by his royalty, 
among the oaths they make him take to maintain their religion 
and laivs, to be valiant, just and mild; he moreover swears, — 
to make the sun run his course in his wonted light, — to drain the 
clouds at a fit season, — to confine rivers within their channels, — 
and to cause all things necessary for his people to be borne by 
the earth.' ' (They told me I was everything. But when 
the rain came to wet me once, when the wind would not 
peace at my bidding/ says Lear, ' there I found them, there 
I smelt them out.)' This, in connection with the preceding 
anecdote, to which, in the opinion of this author, it comes 
properly so very near, may be classed of itself among the 
suggestive stories above referred to; but the bearing of these 
quotations upon the particular question of style, which must de- 
termine the selection here, is set forth in that which follows. 

It should be stated, however, that in a preceding paragraph, 
the author has just very pointedly expressed it as his opinion, 
that men who are supposed, by common consent, to be so far 
above the rest of mankind in their single virtue and judg- 



12 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

ment, that they are permitted to govern them at their dis- 
cretion, should by no means undertake to maintain that view, 
by exhibiting that supposed kingly and divine faculty in the 
way of speech or argument', thus putting themselves on a level 
with their subjects, and by meeting them on their own ground, 
with their own weapons, giving occasion for comparisons, 
perhaps not altogether favourable to that theory of a superla- 
tive and divine difference which the doctrine of a divine 
right to rule naturally presupposes. ' For/ he says, e neither 
is it enough for those who govern and command us, and have all 
the world in their hand, to have a common understanding, and 
to be able to do what the rest can ' [their faculty of judg- 
ment must match their position, for if it be only a common 
one, the difference will make it despised] : ' they are very 
much below us, if they be not infinitely above us. And, 
therefore, silence is to them not only a countenance of respect 
and gravity, but very often of good profit and policy too; 
for, Megabysus going to see Apelles in his painting room, stood 
a great while without speaking a word, and at last began to 
talk of his paintings, for which he received this rude reproof. 
' Whilst thou wast silent, thou seemedst to be something great, 
by reason of thy chains and pomp ; but now that we have heard 
thee speak, there is not the meanest boy in my shop that does 
not despise thee.' But after the author's subsequent reference 
to ' those animals' that were to be made competent by a 
vote of the Athenian people for the work of their superiors, 
to which he adds the custom of people who canonize the 
kings they have chosen out of their own body, which comes 
so near, he goes on thus: — I differ from this common fashion, 
and am more apt to suspect capacity when I see it accom- 
panied with grandeur of fortune and public applause. We are 
to consider of what advantage it is, to speak when one pleases, 
to choose the subject one will speak of — [an advantage not com- 
mon with authors then] — to interrupt or change other 
men's arguments, with a magisterial authority, to 
protect oneself from the opposition of others, by a nod, a 
smile, or silence, in the presence of an assembly that trembles 



MICHAEL DE MONTAIGNE. 1 3 

with reverence and respect. A man of a prodigious fortune, 
coming to give his judgment upon some slight dispute that 
was foolishly set on foot at his table, began in these words: — 
' It can only he a liar or a fool that will say otherwise than 
so and so/ Pursue this philosophical point with a dagger in 
your hand.' 

Here is an author who does contrive to pursue his philo- 
sophical points, however, dagger or no dagger, wherever they 
take him. By putting himself into the trick of singularity, 
and affecting to be a mere compound of eccentricities and 
oddities, neither knowing nor caring what it is that he is 
writing about, and dashing at haphazard into anything as the 
fit takes him, — ' Let us e'en fly at anything,' says Hamlet, — 
by assuming, in short, the disguise of the elder Brutus; and, 
on account of a similar necessity, there is no saying what he 
cannot be allowed to utter with impunity. Under such a 
cover it is, that he inserts the passages already quoted, which 
have lain to this hour without attracting the attention of 
critics, unpractised happily, and unlearned also, in the subtle- 
ties which tyrannies — such tyrannies — at least generate; and 
under this cover it is, that he can venture now on those as- 
tounding political disquisitions, which he connects with the 
complaint of the restrictions and embarrassments which the 
presence of a man of prodigious fortune at the table occasions, 
when an argument, trivial or otherwise, happens to be going 
on there. Under this cover, he can venture to bring in here, 
in this very connection, and to the very table, even of this 
man of prodigious fortune, pages of the freest political dis- 
cussion, containing already the finest analysis of the existing 
political ' situation,' so full of dark and lurid portent, to the eye 
of the scientific statesman, to whom, even then, already under 
the most intolerable restrictions of despotism, of the two ex- 
tremes of social evil, that which appeared to be the most 
terrible, and the most to be guarded against, in the inevitable 
political changes then at hand, was — not the consolidation but 
the dissolution of the state. 

For already the horizon of that political oversight included, 



14 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

not the eventualities of the English Revolutions only, hut the 
darker contingencies of those later political and social convul- 
sions, from whose soundless whirlpools, men spring with joy 
to the hardest sharpest ledge of tyranny; or hail with joy and 
national thanksgiving the straw that offers to land them on it. 
Already the scientific statesman of the Elizabethan age could 
say, casting an eye over Christendom as it stood then, • That 
which most threatens us is, not an alteration in the entire and 
solid mass, but its dissipation and divulsion.' 

It is after pages of the freest philosophical discussion, that he 
arrives at this conclusion — discussion, in which the historical 
elements and powers are for the first time scientifically recog- 
nized and treated throughout with the hand of the new master. 
For this is a philosopher, who is able to receive into his philoso- 
phy the fact, that out of the most depraved and vicious social 
materials, by the inevitable operation of the universal natural 
laws, there will, perhaps, result a social adhesion and predomi- 
nance of powers — a social ' whole,' more capable of maintaining 
itself than any that Plato or Aristotle, from the heights of their 
abstractions, could have invented for them. He ridicules, 
indeed, those ideal polities of antiquity as totally unfit for prac- 
tical realisation, and admits that though the question as to that 
which is absolutely the best form of government might be of 
some value in a new ivorld, the basis of all alterations in existing 
governments should be the fact, that we take a world already 
formed to certain customs, and do not beget it, as Pyrrha or 
Cadmus did theirs, and by what means soever we may have 
the privilege to rebuild and reform it anew, we can hardly 
writhe it from its wonted bent, but we shall break all. For 
the subtlest principles of the philosophy of things are intro- 
duced into this discussion, and the boldest applications of the 
Shakspere muse are repeated in it. 

' That is the way to lay all flat' cries the philosophic poet 
in the Roman play, opposing on the part of the Conservatist, 
the violence of an oppressed people, struggling for new forms 
of government, and bringing out fully, along with their 
claims, the anti-revolutionary side of the question. 



MICHAEL DE MONTAIGNE. 15 

' That which tempts me out on these journeys,' continues 
this foreign philosopher, speaking in his usual ambiguous 
terms of his rambling excursive habits and eccentricities of 
proceedings, glancing also, perhaps, at his outlandish tastes — 
1 that which tempts me out on these journeys, is unsuitableness 
to the present manners of OUR state. I could easily console 
myself with this corruption in reference to the public interest, 
but not to my own : I am in particular too much oppressed : — 
for, in my neighbourhood we are of late by the long libertinage 
of our civil wars grown old in so riotous a form of state, that 
in earnest His a wonder how it can subsist. In fine, I see by 
our example, that the society of men is maintained and held 
together at what price soever ; in what condition soever they are 
placed they will close and stick together [see the doctrine of 
things and their original powers in the ' Novum Organum'] — 
moving and heaping up themselves, as uneven bodies, that shuffled 
together without order, find of themselves means to unite and 
settle. King Philip mustered up a rabble of the most wicked 
and incorrigible rascals he could pick out, and put them alto- 
gether in a city which he had built for that purpose, which 
bore their name ; I believe that they, even from vices, erected 
a government among them, and a commodious and just 
society.' 

' Nothing presses so hard upon a state as innovation' ; and let 
the reader note here, how the principle which has predominated 
historically in the English Revolution, the principle which the 
fine Frankish, half Gallic genius, with all its fire and artistic 
faculty, could not strike instinctively or empirically, in its 
political experiments — it is well to note, how this distinctive 
element of the English Revolution — that revolution which 
is still in progress, with its remedial vitalities — already 
speaks beforehand, from the lips of this foreign Elizabethan 
Revolutionist. i Nothing presses so hard upon a state as inno- 
vation; change only gives form to injustice and tyranny. 
When any piece is out of order it may be propped, 
one may prevent and take care that the decay and corruption 
natural to all things, do not carry us too far from our 



l6 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

beginnings and principles ; but to undertake to found so great a 
mass anew, and to change the foundations of so vast a building, 
is for them to do who to make clean, efface, who would reform 
particular defects by a universal confusion, and cure diseases by 
death! Surely, one may read in good Elizabethan English 
passages which savor somewhat of this policy. One would say 
that the principle was in fact identical, as, for instance, in this 
case. ' Sir Francis Bacon (who was always for moderate coun- 
sels), when one was speaking of such a reformation of the 
Church of England, as would in effect make it no church, said 
thus to him: — ' Sir, the subject we talk of is the eye of Eng- 
land, and if there be a speck or two in the eye, we endeavour 
to take them off; but he were a strange oculist who would pull 
out the eye.' * 

But our Gascon philosopher goes on thus, with his Gascon 
inspirations : and these sportive notions, struck off at a 
heat, these careless intuitions, these fine new practical axioms 
of scientific politics, appear to be every whit as good as 
if they had been sifted through the scientific tables of the 
Novum Organum. They are, in fact, the identical truth 
which the last vintage of the Novum Organum yields on this 
point. ' The world is unapt for curing itself; it is so impa- 
tient of any thing that presses it, that it thinks of nothing but 
disengaging itself, at what price soever. We see, by a thousand 
examples, that it generally cures itself to its cost. The dis- 
charge of a present evil is no cure, if a general amendment of 
condition does not folloio ; the surgeon's end is not only to cut 
away the dead flesh, — that is but the progress of his cure; — 
he has a care over and above, to fill up the wound with better 
and more natural flesh, and to restore the member to Us due state. 
Whoever only projjoses to himself to remove that which offends 

* And here is another writer who seems to be taking, on this point 
and others, very much the same view of the constitution and vitality 
of states, about these times : — 

He's a disease that must be cut away. 

Oh, he's a limb that has but a disease ; 

Mortal to cut it off ; to cure it, easy. 



MICHAEL DE MONTAIGNE. I ~] 

him, falls short; for good does not necessarily succeed evil; 
another evil may succeed, and a worse, as it happened in Ccesars 
killers, who brought the republic to such a pass, that they had 
reason to repent their meddling with it.' * I fear there will a 
worse one come in his place,' says a fellow in Shakespear's 
crowd, at the first Caesar's funeral; and that his speech made 
the moral of the piece, we shall see in the course of this 
study. 

But though the frantic absolutisms and irregularities of that 
' old riotous form of military government,' which the long civil 
wars had generated, seemed of themselves to threaten speedy 
dissolution, this old Gascon prophet, with his inexhaustible 
fund of English shrewdness, and sound English sense, under- 
lying all his Gasconading, by no means considers the state as past 
the statesman's care: ' after all, ice are not, perhaps, at the last 
gasp,' he says. ' The conservation of states is a thing that in all 
likelihood surpasses our understanding : a civil government is, as 
Plato says, ' a mighty and powerful thing, and hard to be dis- 
solved.' ' States, as great engines, move slowly,' says Lord 
Bacon ; ' and are not so soon put out of frame' ; — that is, so soon 
as ' the resolution of particular persons,' which is his reason for 
producing his moral philosophy, or rather his moral science, as 
his engine for attack upon the state, a science which concerns 
the government of every man over himself ; ' for, as in Egypt, 
the seven good years sustained the seven bad; so governments, 
for a time well-grounded, do bear out errors following.' 
But this is the way that this Gascon philosopher records his 
conclusions on the same subject. ' Every thing that totters 
does not fall. The contexture of so great a body holds by 
more nails than one. It holds even by its antiquity, like old 
buildings from which the foundations are worn away by time, 
without rough cast or cement, which yet live or support them- 
selves by their own weight. Moreover, it is not rightly to go 
to work to reconnoitre only the flank and the fosse, to judge of 
the security of a place; it must be examined which way ap- 
proaches can be made to it, and in what condition the 
ASSAILANT IS ' — that is the question. i Few vessels sink with 

C 



1 8 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

their own weight, and without some exterior violence. Let us 
every way cast our eyes. Every thing about us totters. In 
all the great states, both of Christendom and elsewhere, that 
are known to us, if you will but look, you will there see evi- 
dent threats of alteration and ruin. Astrologers need not go 
to heaven to foretell, as they do, great revolutions ' [this 
is the speech of the Elizabethan age — ' great revolutions '] 
and imminent mutations.' [This is the new kind of learning 
and prophecy; there was but one source of it open then, 
that could yield axioms of this kind ; for this is the kind that 
Lord Bacon tells us the head-spring of sciences must be visited 
for.] ' But conformity is a quality antagonist to dissolution. 
For my part, I despair not, and fancy I perceive ways to 
save us.' 

And surely this is one of the inserted private articles, before 
mentioned, which may, or may not be, e designed to spend 
their use among the men now living ' ; but ' which concern 
the particular knowledge of some who will see further into 
them than the common reader.' If there had been a ' London 
Times ' going then, and this old outlandish Gascon Antic had 
been an English statesman preparing this article as a leader 
for it, the question of the Times could hardly have been more 
roundly dealt with, or with a clearer northern accent. 

But it is high time for him to bethink himself, and ' draw 
his old cloak about him'; for, after all, this so just and pro- 
found a view of so grave a subject, proceeds from one who has 
no aims, no plan, no learning, no memory; — a vain, fantas- 
tic egotist, who writes only because he will be talking, and 
talking of himself above all; who is not ashamed to attribute 
to himself all sorts of mad inconsistent humours, and to con- 
tradict himself on every page, if thereby he can only win your 
eye, or startle your curiosity, and induce you to follow him. 
After so long and grave a discussion, suddenly it occurs to him 
that it is time for a little miscellaneous confidential chat about 
himself, and those certain oddities of his which he does not 
wish you to lose sight of altogether; and it is time, too, for 
another of those stories, which serve to divert the attention 



MICHAEL DE MONTAIGNE. 1 9 

when it threatens to become too fixed, and break up and 
enliven the dull passages, besides having that other purpose 
which he speaks of so frankly. And although this whole dis- 
cussion is not without a direct bearing upon that particular 
topic, with which it is here connected, inasmuch as the 
political situation, which is so clearly exhibited, is precisely 
that of the Elizabethan scholar, it is chiefly this little piece of 
confidential chat with which it closes, and its significance in 
that connection, which gives the rest its insertion here. 

For suddenly he recollects himself, and stops short to ex- 
press the fear that he may have written something similar to 
this elsewhei'e; and he gives you to understand — not all at 
once — but by a series of strokes, that too bold a repetition here, 
of what he has said elsewhere might be attended, to him, with 
serious consequences; and he begs you to note, as he does in 
twenty other passages and stories here and elsewhere, that his 
style is all hampered with considerations such as these — that 
instead of merely thinking of making a good book, and pre- 
senting his subjects in their clearest and most effective form 
for the reader; — a thing in itself sufficiently laborious, as 
other authors find to their cost, he is all the time compelled to 
weigh his words with reference to such points as this. He 
must be perpetually on his guard that the identity of that 
which he presents here, and that which he presents elsewhere, 
under other and very different forms (in much graver forms 
perhaps, and perhaps in others not so grave), shall no where 
become so glaring as to attract popular attention, while he is 
willing and anxious to keep that identity or connection con- 
stantly present to the apprehension of the few, for whom he 
tells us his book — that is, this book within the book — is 
written. 

' I fear in these reveries of mine,' he continues, suspending 
at last suddenly this bold and continuous application to the 
immediate political emergency of those philosophical princi- 
ciples which he has exhibited in the abstract, in their common 
and universal form, elsewhere ; ' I fear, in these reveries of 
mine, the treachery of my memory, lest by inadvertence it 

c 2 



20 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

should make me write the same thing twice. Now I here set 
down nothing new, these are common thoughts, and having per- 
adventure conceived them a hundred times, / am afraid I have 
set them down somewhere else already. Repetition is every- 
where troublesome, though it were in Homer, but 'tis ruinous 
in things that have only a superficial and transitory SHOW. I 
do not love inculcation, even in the most profitable things, as 
in Seneca, and the practice of his Stoical school displeases me 
of repeating upon every subject and at length, the PRINCIPLES 
and presuppositions that serve in general, and al- 
ways to re-allege anew ;' that is, under the particular divisions of 
the subject, common and universal reasons. ' What I cannot ex- 
press I point out with my finger,' he tells you elsewhere, but it 
is thus that he continues here. 

' My memory grows worse and worse every day. I must 
fain for the time to come (collateral sounds), for hitherto, thank 
God, nothing has happened much amiss, to avoid all preparation, 
for fear of tying myself to some obligation upon which I must 
be forced to insist. To be tied and bound to a thing puts me 
quite out, and especially where I have to depend upon so weak 
an instrument as my memory. I never could read this story 
without being offended at it, with as it were a personal and 
natural resentment.' The reader will note that the question 
here is of style, or method, and of this author's style in par- 
ticular, and of his special embarrassments. 

'Lyncestes accused of conspiracy against Alexander, the clay 
that he was brought out before the army, according to the 
custom, to be heard in his defence, had prepared a studied 
speech, of which, haggling and stammering, he pronounced 
some words. As he was becoming more perplexed and strug- 
gling with his memory, and trying to recollect himself, the 
soldiers that stood nearest killed him with their spears, looking 
upon his confusion and silence as a confession of his guilt: 
very fine, indeed ! The place, the spectators, the expectation, 
would astound a man even though were there no object in his 
mind but to speak well ; but what when 'tis an harangue 
upon which his life depends?' You that happen to be of my 



MICHAEL DE MONTAIGNE. 21 

car, it is my style that we are speaking of, and there is my 
story? 

1 For my part the very being tied to what I am to say, is 
enough to loose me from if — that is the cause of his wander- 
ing — ' The more I trust to my memory, the more do I put myself 
out of my own power, so much as to find it in my own counte- 
nance, and have sometimes been very much put to it to conceal 
the slavery wherein I ivas bound, whereas my design is to mani- 
fest in speaking a perfect nonchalance, both of face and accent, 
and casual and unpremeditated motions, as rising from present 
occasions, choosing rather to say nothing to purpose, than to 
shoio that I came prepared to speak well; a thing especially un- 
becoming a man of my profession. The preparation begets a 
great deal more expectation than it will satisfy ; a man very 
often absurdly strips himself to his doublet to leap no further 
than he would have done in his gown.' [Perhaps the reflecting 
scholar will recollect to have seen an instance of this magni- 
ficent preparation for saying something to the purpose, attended 
with similarly lame conclusions ; but, if he does not, the story 
which follows may tend to refresh his memory on this point.] 
' It is recorded of the orator Curio, that when he proposed the 
division of his oration into three or four parts, it often hap- 
pened either that he forgot some one, or added one or two 
more.' A much more illustrious speaker, who spoke under 
circumstances not very unlike those in which the poor con- 
spirator above noted made his haggling and fatal attempts at 
oratory, is known to have been guilty of a similar oversight; 
for, having invented a plan of universal science, designed for 
the relief of the human estate, he forgot the principal appli- 
cation of it. But this author says, I have always avoided 
falling into this inconvenience, having always hated these 
promises and announcements, not only out of distrust of my 
memory, but also because this method relishes too much of 
the artificial. You will find no scientific plan here ostenta- 
tiously exhibited ; you will find such a plan elsewhere with all 
the works set down in it, but the works themselves will be 
missing; and you will find the works elsewhere, but it will be 



22 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

under the cover of a superficial and transitory show, where it 
would be ruinous to produce the plan, '/have always atoided 
falling into this inconvenience. Simpliciora militares decent.' 
But as he appears, after all, to have had no military weapon 
with which to sustain that straight-forwardness of speech 
which is becoming in a military power, and no dagger to pur- 
sue his points with, some artifice, though he professes not to 
like it, may be necessary, and the rule which he here spe- 
cifies is, on the whole, perhaps, not altogether amiss. ' 'Tis 
enough that I have promised to myself never to take upon me 
to speak in a place where 1 owe respect; for as to that sort of 
speaking where a man reads his speech, besides that it is very 
absurd, it is a mighty disadvantage to those who naturally 
could give it a grace by action, and to rely upon the mercy of 
the readiness of my invention, I will much less do it; 'tis 
heavy and perplexed, and such as would never furnish me in 
sudden and important necessities.' 

' Speaking/ he says in another place, ' hurts and discom- 
poses me, — my voice is loud and high, so that when I have 
gone to whisper some great person about an affair of conse- 
quence, they have often had to moderate my voice. This story 
deserves a place here. 

1 Some one in a certain Greek school was speaking loud as I 
do. The master of the ceremonies sent to him to speak lower. 
1 Tell him then, he must send me,' replied the other, ' the tone 
he would have me speak in.' To which the other replied, 
' that he should take the tone from the ear of him to whom he 
spake.' It was well said, if it be understood. Speak accord- 
ing to the affair you are speaking about to the auditor, — 
(speak according to the business you have in hand, to the 
purpose you have to accomplish) — for if it mean, it is suffi- 
cient that he hears you, I do not find it reason.' It is a more 
artistic use of speech that he is proposing in his new science of 
it, for as Lord Bacon has it, who writes as we shall see on this 
same subject, ' the proofs and persuasions of rhetoric ought to 
differ according to the auditors,' and the Arts of Rhetoric have 
for their legitimate end, ' not merely PROOF, but much more, 



MICHAEL DE MONTAIGNE. 23 

impression.' e For many forms are equal in signification which 
are differing in impression, as the difference is great in the 
piercing of 1 hat which is sharp, and that which is flat, though 
the strength of the percussion be the same; for instance, there 
is no man but will be a little more raised, by hearing it said, 
' Your enemies will be glad of this,' than by hearing it said 
only, ' This is evil for you/ But it is thus that our Gascon 
proceeds, whose comment on his Greek story we have inter- 
rupted. ' There is a voice to flatter, there is a voice to instruct, 
and a voice to reprehend. I would not only have my voice to 
reach my hearer, but peradventure that it strike and pierce 
him. When I rate my footman in a sharp and bitter tone, 
it would be very fine for him to say, ' Pray master, speak 
lower, for I hear you very well/ Speaking is half his that 
speaks, and half his that hears ; the last ought to prepare him- 
self to receive it, according to its motion, as with tennis 
players; he that receives the ball, shifts, draws back, and pre- 
pares himself to receive it, according as he sees him move, 
who strikes the stroke, and according to the stroke itself/ It 
is not, therefore, because this author has failed to furnish the 
rules of interpretation necessary for penetrating to the ultimate 
intention of this new kind of speaking, if all this affectation of 
simplicity, and all these absurd contradictory statements of his, 
have been suffered hitherto to pass unchallenged. It is the 
public mind he has to deal with. ' That which he adores in 
kings is the throng of their adorers. 1 If he should take the 
public- at once into his confidence, and tell them beforehand 
precisely what his own opinions were of things in general, if 
he should set before them in the outset the conclusions to 
which he proposed to drive them, he might indeed stand 
some chance to have his arguments interrupted, or changed 
with a magisterial authority; he would indeed find it ne- 
cessary to pursue his philosophical points with a dagger in 
his hand. 

And besides, this dogmatical mode of teaching does not 
appear to him to secure the ends of teaching. He wishes to 
rouse the human mind to activity, to compel it to think for 



2^ THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

itself,. and put it on the inevitable road to his conclusions. 
He wishes the reader to strike out those conclusions for him- 
self, and fancy himself the discoverer if he will. So far from 
being simple and straightforward, his style is in the profoundest 
degree artistic, for the soul of all our modern art inspired it. 
He thinks it does no good for scholars to call out to the active 
world from the platform of their last conclusions. The truths 
which men receive from those didactic heights remain foreign 
to them. ' We want medicines to arouse the sense,' says Lord 
Bacon, who proposed exactly the method of teaching which 
this philosopher had, as it would seem, already adopted. ' I 
bring a trumpet to awake his ear, to set his sense on the 
attentive bent, and then to speak/ says that poet who best put 
this art in practice. 

But here it is the prose philosopher who would meet this 
dull, stupid, custom-bound public on its own ground. He 
would assume all its absurdities and contradictions in his own 
person, and permit men to despise, and marvel, and laugh at 
them in him without displeasure. For whoever will notice 
carefully, will perceive that the use of the personal pronoun 
here, is not the limited one of our ordinary speech. Such an 
one will find that this philosophical I is very broad; that it 
covers too much to be taken in its literal acceptation. Under 
this term, the term by which each man names himself, the 
common term of the individual humanity, he finds it conveni- 
ent to say many things. ' They that will fight custom with 
grammar? he says, ' are fools. When another tells me, or 
when I say to myself, This is a word of Gascon growth; this a 
dangerous phrase; this is an ignorant discourse; thou art too 
full of figures; this is a paradoxical saying; this is a foolish 
expression : thou makest thyself merry sometimes, and men will 
think thou sayest a thing in good earnest, which thou only 
speakest in jest. Yes, say I; but I correct the faults of inad- 
vertence, not those of custom. I have done what I designed,' 
he says, in triumph. ' All the world knows ME in my book, 
and my book in me/ 

And thus, by describing human nature under that term, or 



MICHAEL DE MONTAIGNE. 25 

by repeating and stating the common opinions as his own, he 
is enabled to create an opposition which could not exist, so 
long as they remain unconsciously operative, or infolded in 
the separate individuality, as a part of its own particular 
form. 

1 My errors are sometimes natural and incorrigible,' he says; 
' but the good which virtuous men do to the public in making 
themselves imitated, I, perhaps, may do in making my manners 
avoided. While I publish and accuse my own imperfections, 
somebody will learn to be afraid of them. The parts that I 
most esteem in myself, are more honoured in decrying than 
in commending my own manners. Pausanias tells us of an 
ancient player upon the lyre, who used to make his scholars 
go to hear one that lived over against him, and played very 
ill, that they might learn to hate his discords and false 
measures. The present time is fitting to reform us backward, 
more by dissenting than agreeing ; by differing than consent- 
ing.' That is his application of his previous confession. And 
it is this present time that he impersonates, holding the mirror 
up to nature, and provoking opposition and criticism for that 
which was before buried in the unconsciousness of a common 
absurdity, or a common wrong. ' Profiting little by good ex- 
amples, I endeavour to render myself as agreeable as I see 
others offensive ; as constant as I see others fickle ; as good as 
I see others evil/ 

' There is no fancy so frivolous and extravagant that does 
not seem to me a suitable product of the human mind. All 
such whimsies as are in use amongst us, deserve at least to be 
hearkened to; for my part, they only with me import inanity, 
but they import that. Moreover, vulgar and casual opinions are 
something more than nothing in nature. 

' If I converse with a man of mind, and no flincher, who 
presses hard upon me, right and left, his imagination raises up 
mine. The contradictons of judgments do neither offend nor 
alter, they only rouse and exercise me. I could suffer myself 
to be rudely handled by my friends. ' Thou art a fool; thou 
knowest not what thou art talking about.' When any one 



26 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

contradicts me, he raises my attention, not my anger. I ad- 
vance towards him that contradicts, as to one that instructs 
me. I embrace and caress truth, in what hand soever 1 find it, 
and cheerfully surrender myself, and extend to it my conquered 
arms ; and take a pleasure in being reproved, and accommodate 
myself to my accusers [aside] (very often more by reason of 
civility than amendment); loving to gratify the liberty of ad- 
monition, by my facility of submitting to it, at my own 
expense. Nevertheless, it is hard to bring the men of my 
time to it. They have not the courage to correct, because they 
have not the courage to be corrected, and speak always with 
dissimulation in the presence of one another. I take so great 
pleasure in being judged and known, that it is almost indiffer- 
ent to me in which of THE TWO FORMS I am so. My imagi- 
nation does so often contradict and condemn itself, that it is 
all one to me if another do it. The study of books is a languish- 
ing, feeble motion, that heats not, whereas conversation 
teaches and exercises at once.' But what if a book could be 
constructed on a new principle, so as to produce the effect of 
conference — of the noblest kind of conference — so as to rouse 
the stupid, lethargic mind to a truly human activity — so as to 
bring out the common, human form, in all its latent actuality, 
from the eccentricities of the individual varieties? Something 
of that kind appears to be attempted here. 

He cannot too often charge the attentive reader, however, 
that his arguments require examination. ' In conferences,' he 
says, ' it is a rule that every word that seems to be good, is not 
immediately to be accepted. One must try it on all points, to 
see how it is lodged in the author: [perhaps he is not in earnest] 
for one must not always presently yield what truth or beauty 
soever seem to be in the argument/ A little delay, and op- 
position, the necessity of hunting, or fighting, for it, will 
only make it the more esteemed in the end. In such a style, 
' either the author must stoutly oppose it [that is, whatsoever 
beauty or truth is to be the end of the argument in order 
to challenge the reader] or draw back, under colour of not 
understanding it, [and so piquing the reader into a pursuit of 



MICHAEL DE MONTAIGNE. 27 

it] or, sometimes, perhaps, he may aid the point, and carry 
it beyond its proper reach [and so forcing the reader to correct 
him. This whole work is constructed on this principle] . As 
when I contend with a vigorous man, I please myself with 
anticipating his conclusions; I ease him of the trouble of 
explaining himself; I strive to prevent his imagination, whilst 
it is yet springing and imperfect; the order and pertinency 
of his understanding warns and threatens me afar off. But as 
to these, — and the sequel explains this relative, for it has no 
antecedent in the text — as to these, I deal quite contrary 
with them. I must understand and presuppose nothing but by 

them Now, if you come to explain anything to them and 

confirm them (these readers), they presently catch at it, and 
rob you of the advantage of your interpretation. ' It was 
what I was about to say; it was just my thought, and if I did 
not express it so, it was only for want of language. Very 
pretty ! Malice itself must be employed to correct this proud 
ignorance — 'tis injustice and inhumanity to relieve and set 
him right who stands in no need of it, and is the worse for 
it. I love to let him step deeper into the mire,"' — [luring 
him on with his own confessions, and with my assumptions 
of his case] e and so deep that if it be possible, they may at 
least discern their error. Folly and absurdity are not 
to be cured by bare admonition. What Cyrus an- 
swered him who importuned him to harangue his army upon 
the point of battle, ' that men do not become valiant and 
warlike on a sudden, by a fine oration, no more than a man 
becomes a good musician by hearing a fine song/ may properly 
be said of such an admonition as this;' or, as Lord Bacon has 
it, * It were a strange speech, which spoken, or spoken oft, 
should reclaim a man from a vice to which he is by nature 
subject; it is order, pursuit, sequence, and interchange of applica- 
tion, which is mighty in nature.' But the other continues : — 
' These are apprenticeships that are to be served beforehand 
by a long continued education. We owe this care and this 
assiduity of correction and instruction to our own, [that is 
the school,] but to go to preach to the first passer-by, and to 



28 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

lord it over the ignorance and folly of the first we meet, is a 
thing that I abhor. I rarely do it, even in my own particular 
conferences, and rather surrender my cause, than proceed to 
these supercilious and magisterial instructions.' The clue to 
the reading of his inner book. This is what Lord Bacon also 
condemns, as the magisterial method, — ' My humour is unfit, 
either to speak or write for beginners;' he will not shock or 
bewilder them by forcing on them prematurely the last 
conclusions of science; e but as to things that are said in com- 
mon discourse or amongst other things, I never oppose them 
either by word or sign, how false or absurd soever.' 

' Let none even doubt,' says the author of the Novum Or- 
ganum, who thought it wisest to steer clear even of doubt on 
such a point, ' whether we are anxious to destroy and demolish 
the philosophical arts and sciences which are now in use. On the 
contrary, we readily cherish their practice, cultivation, and 
honour; for we by no means interfere to prevent the prevalent 
system from encouraging discussion, adorning discourses, or 
being employed serviceably in the chair of the Professor, or 
the practice of common life, and being taken in short, by 
general consent, as current coin. Nay, we plainly declare that 
the system we offer will not be very suitable for such purposes, 
not being easily adapted to vulgar apprehension except by 
effects and works. To show our sincerity [hear] in pro- 
fessing our regard and friendly disposition towards the received 
sciences, we can refer to the evidence of our published writings, 
especially our books on — the Advancement — [the Advance- 
ment] of Learning ! And the reader who can afford time for 
f a second cogitation/ the second cogitation which a super- 
ficial and interior meaning, of course, requires, with the aid 
of the key of times, will find much light on that point, here 
and there, in the works referred to, and especially in those 
parts of them in which the scientific use of popular terms is 
treated. ' We will not, therefore,' he continues, ' endeavour 
to evince it (our sincerity) any further by words, but content 

ourselves with steadily, etc., professedly premising 

that no great progress can be made by the present methods 



MICHAEL DE MONTAIGNE. 20, 

in the theory and contemplation of science, and that they 
can «o/ be made to produce any very abundant effects' This 
is the proof of his sincerity in professing his regard and 
friendly disposition towards them, to be taken in connection 
with his works on the Advancement of Learning, and no 
doubt it was sincere, and just to that extent to which these 
statements, and the practice which was connected with them, 
would seem to indicate; but the careful reader will perceive 
that it was a regard, and friendliness of disposition, which 
was naturally qualified by that doubly significant fact last 
quoted. 

But the question of style is still under discussion here, and 
no wonder that with such views of the value of the ' current 
coin,' and with a regard and reverence for the received 
sciences so deeply qualified; or, as the other has it, with a 
humour so unfit either to speak or write for beginners, a style 
which admitted of other efficacies than bare proofs, should 
appear to be demanded for popular purposes, or for beginners. 
And no wonder that with views so similar on this first and so 
radical point, these two men should have hit upon the same 
method in Rhetoric exactly, though it was then wholly new. 
But our Gascon goes on to describe its freedoms and 
novelties, its imitations of the living conference, its new 
vitalities. 

' May we not,' says the successful experimenter in this very 
style, ' mix with the subject of conversation and communication, 
the quick and sharp repartees which mirth and familiarity 
introduce amongst friends pleasantly and wittingly jesting with 
one another; an exercise for which my natural gaiety renders 
me fit enough, if it be not so extended and serious as the other 
I just spoke of, 'tis no less smart and ingenious, nor of less 
utility as Lycurgus thought! 



30 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 



CHAPTER II. 

FURTHER ILLUSTRATION OF ' PARTICULAR METHODS 

OF TRADITION.' EMBARRASSMENTS OF LITERARY 

STATESMEN. 

Here's neither bush, nor shrub to bear off any weather at all, 
and another storm brewing. I hear it sing in the wind. My 
best way is to creep under his gaberdine ; there is no other 
shelter hereabout : Misery acquaints a man with strange bed- 
fellows. I will here shroud, till the dregs of the storm be 
past. — Tensest. 

TTEBE then, in the passages already quoted, we find the plan 
■*-*■ and theory — the premeditated form of a new kind of So- 
cratic performance ; and this whole work, as well as some others 
composed in this age, make the realization of it; an inven- 
tion which proposes to substitute for the languishing feeble 
motion which is involved in the study of books — the kind 
of books which this author found invented when he came — 
for the passive, sluggish receptivity of another's thought, 
the living glow of pursuit and discovery, the flash of self- 
conviction. 

It is a Socratic dialogue, indeed ; but it waits for the reader's 
eye to open it ; he is himself the principal interlocutor in it ; 
there can be nothing done till he comes in. Whatsoever beauty 
or truth maybe in the argument; whatsoever jokes and re- 
partees ; whatsoever infinite audacities of mirth may be hidden 
under that grave cover, are not going to shine out for any 
lazy book-worm's pleasure. He that will not work, neither 
shall he eat of this food. ' Up to the mountains,' for this is 
hunters language, c and he that strikes the venison first shall be 
lord of this feast.' It is an invention whereby the author will 



MICHAEL DE MONTAIGNE. 3 1 

remedy for himself the complaint, that life is short, and art is 
long; whereby he will ' outstretch his span/ and make over, 
not his learning only but his living to the future ; — it is an in- 
strumentality by which he will still maintain living relations 
with the minds of men, by which he will put himself into the 
most intimate relations of sympathy, and confidence, and 
friendship, with the mind of the few; by which he will re- 
produce his purposes and his faculties in them, and train them 
to take up in their turn that thread of knowledges which is to 
be spun on. 

But if this design be buried so deeply, is it not lost then? 
If all the absurd and contradictory developments — if all the 
mad inconsistencies — all the many-sided contradictory views, 
which are possible to human nature on all the questions of 
human life, which this single personal pronoun was made to 
represent, in the profoundly philosophic design of the author, 
are still culled out by learned critics, and made to serve as the 
material of a grave, though it is lamented, somewhat egotisti- 
cal biography, is not all this ingenuity, which has success- 
fully evaded thus far not the careless reader only, but the 
scrutiny of the scholar, and the sharp eye of the reviewer 
himself, is it not an ingenuity which serves after all to little 
purpose, which indeed defeats its own design? No, by no 
means. That disguise which was at first a necessity, has be- 
come the instrument of his power. It is that broad / of his, 
that I myself, with which he still takes all the world ; it is 
that single, many-sided, vivacious, historical impersonation, 
that ideal impersonation of the individual human nature as it 
is — not as it should be — with all its ' weaved-up follies ravelled 
out,' with all its before unconfessed actualities, its infinite ab- 
surdities and contradictions, so boldly pronounced and assumed 
by one laying claim to an historical existence, it is this his- 
torical assumption and pronunciation of all the before unspoken, 
unspeakable facts of this unexplored department of natural 
history, it is this apparent confession with which this ma- 
gician entangles his victims, as he tells us in a passage already 
quoted, and leads them on through that objective representa- 



32 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

tion of their follies in which they may learn to hate them, to 
that globe mirror — that mirror of the age which he boasts to 
have hung up here, when he says, ( I have done what I de- 
signed : all the world knows me in my book, and my book in me.' 

Who shall say that it is yet time to strip him of the disguise 
which he wears so effectively? With all his faults, and all 
his egotisms, who would not be sorry to see him taken to 
pieces, after all? And who shall quite assure us, that it would 
not still be treachery, even now, for those who have unwound 
his clues, and traversed his labyrinths to the heart of his mys- 
tery, — for those who have penetrated to the chamber of his 
inner school, to come out and blab a secret with which he still 
works so potently; insensibly to those on whom he works, 
perhaps, yet so potently? But there is no harm done. It 
will still take the right reader to find his way through these 
new devices in letters ; these new and vivacious proofs of learn- 
ing; for him, and for none other, they lurk there still. 

To evade political restrictions, and to meet the popular 
mind on its own ground, was the double purpose of the dis- 
guise; but it is a disguise which will only detect, and not baffle, 
the mind that is able to identify itself with his, and able to 
grasp his purposes ; it is a disguise which will only detect the 
mind that knows him, and his purposes already. The enig- 
matical form of the inculcation is the device whereby that 
mind will be compelled to follow his track, to think for itself 
his thoughts again, to possess itself of the inmost secret of his 
intention ; for it is a school in whose enigmatical devices the 
mind of the future was to be caught, in whose subtle exercises 
the child of the future was to be trained to an identity that 
should restore the master to his work again, and bring forth 
anew, in a better hour, his clogged and buried genius. 

But, if the fact that a new and more vivid kind of writing, 
issuing from the heart of the new philosophy of things, designed 
to work new and extraordinary effects by means of literary 
instrumentalities, — effects hitherto reserved for other modes 
of impression, — if the fact, that a new and infinitely artistic 
mode of writing, burying the secrets of philosophy in the most 



MICHAEL DE MONTAIGNE. 33 

careless forms of the vulgar and popular discourse, did, in this 
instance at least, exist ; if this be proved, it will suffice for our 
present purpose. What else remains to be established con- 
cerning points incidentally started here, will be found more 
pertinent to another stage of this enquiry. 

From beginning to end, the whole work might be quoted, 
page by page, in proof of this; but after the passages already 
produced here, there would seem to be no necessity for accu- 
mulating any further evidence on this point. A passage or 
two more, at least, will suffice to put that beyond question. 
The extracts which follow, in connection with those already 
given, will serve, at least, to remove any rational doubt on 
that point, and on some others, too, perhaps. 

' But whatever I deliver myself to be, provided it be such 
as I really am, I have my end ; neither will I make any ex- 
cuse for committing to paper such mean and frivolous things 
as these ; the meanness of the subject compels me to it.' — 
' Human reason is a two-edged and a dangerous sword. Observe, 
in the hand of Socrates, her most intimate and familiar friend, 
how many points it has. Thus, I am good for nothing but to 
follow, and suffer myself to be easily carried away with the 
crowd.' — ' I have this opinion of these political controversies : 
Be on what side you will, you have as fair a game to play as 
your adversary, provided you do not proceed so far as to 
jostle principles that are too manifest to be disputed; and yet, 
7fs my notion, in public affairs [hear], there is no government so 
ill, provided it be ancient, and has been constant, that is not 
better than change and alteration. Our manners are infinitely 
corrupted, and wonderfully incline to grow worse : of our laws 
and customs, there are many that are barbarous and monstrous : 
nevertheless, by reason of the difficulty of reformation, and the 
danger of stirring things, if 1 could put something under to stay 
the wheel, and keep it where it is, / would do so with all my 
heart. It is very easy to beget in a people a contempt of its 
ancient observances; never any man undertook, but he succeeded; 
but to establish a better regimen in the stead of that a man has 
overthrown, many ivho have attempted this have foundered in the 

D 



34 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

attempt. I very little consult my prudence [philosophic ' pru- 
dence'] in my conduct. I am willing to let it be guided by 
public rule. 

' In fine, to return to myself, the only things by which / 
esteem myself to be something, is that wherein never any man 
thought himself to be defective. My recommendation is vulgar 
and common; for whoever thought he wanted sense. It would 
be a proposition that would imply a contradiction in itself ; [in 
such subtleties thickly studding this popular work, the clues 
which link it with other works of this kind are found — the 
clues to a new practical human pkiloso2)hy.~] ' Tis a disease that 
never is where it is discerned; 'tis tenacious and strong; but 
the first ray of the patients sight does nevertheless pierce it 
through and disperse it, as the beams of the sun do a thick 
mist: to accuse one's self, would be to excuse one's self in this 
case; and to condemn, to absolve. There never was porter, or 
silly girl, that did not 'think they had sense enough for their 
need. The reasons that proceed from the natural arguing of 
others, we think that if we had turned our thoughts that wav, 
we should ourselves have found it out as well as they. Know- 
ledge, style, and such parts as we see in other works, we are 
readily aware if they excel our own ; but for the simple pro- 
ducts of the understanding, every one thinks he could have 
found out the like, and is hardly sensible of the weight and 
difficulty, unless — and then with much ado — in an extreme 
and incomparable distance; and whoever should be able clearly 
to discern the height of another's judgment, would be also able 
to raise his own to the same pitch ; so that this is a sort of 
exercise, from which a man is to expect very little praise, a 
kind of composition of small repute. And, besides, for whom do 
you write? ' — for he is merely meeting this common sense. His 
object is merely to make his reader confess, 'That was just 
what I was about to say, it was just my thought; and if I did 
not express it so, it was only for want of language ; ' — * for 
whom do you write? The learned, to whom the authority 
appertains of judging books, know no other value but that of 
learning, and allow of no other process of wit but that of eru- 



MICHAEL DE MONTAIGNE. 35 

dition and art. If you have mistaken one of the Scipios for 
another, what is all the rest you have to say worth? Who- 
ever is ignorant of Aristotle, according to their rule, is in 
some sort ignorant of himself. Heavy and vulgar souls car> 
not discern the grace of a high and unfettered style. Now 
these two sorts of men make the world. The third sort, 
into whose hands you fall, of souls that are regular, and 
strong of themselves, is so rare, that it justly has neither name 
nor place amongst us, and it is pretty well time lost to aspire 
to it, or to endeavour to please it.' He will not content him- 
self with pleasing the few. He wishes to move the world, 
and its approbation is a secondary question with him. 

'He that should record my idle talk, to the prejudice of the most 
paltry law, opinion, or custom of his parish, would do himself 
a great deal of wrong, and me too; for, in what I say, I war- 
rant no other certainty, but 'tis what I had then in my thought, 
a thought tumultuous and wavering. [' I have nothing with 
this answer, Hamlet/ says the offended king. e These words 
are not mine.' Hamlet: ' Nor mine now.'] All I say is by 
way of discourse. I should not speak so boldly, if it were my 
due to be believed, and so I told a great man, who complained 
to me of the tartness and contention of my advice.' And, indeed, 
he would not, in this instance, that is very certain; — for he 
has been speaking on the subject of religious toleration, 
and among other remarks, somewhat too far in advance of 
his time, he has let fall, by chance, such passages as these, 
which, of course, he stands ready to recall again in case any 
one is offended. ( f These words are not mine, Hamlet.' ' Nor 
mine now.') ' To kill men, a clear and shining light is re- 
quired, and our life is too real and essential, to warrant these 
supernatural and fantastic accidents.' f After all 'tis setting a 
man's conjectures at a very high price to cause a man to be 
roasted alive upon them.'' He does not look up at all, after 
making this accidental remark; for he is too much occupied 
with a very curious story, which happens to come into his head 
at that moment, of certain men, who being more profoundly 
asleep than men usually are, became, according to certain grave 

d 2 



36 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

authorities, what in their dreams they fancied they were; and 
having mentioned one case sufficiently ludicrous to remove 
any unpleasant sensation or inquiry which his preceding allu- 
sion might have occasioned, he resumes, ' If dreams can some- 
times so incorporate themselves with effects of life, I cannot 
believe that therefore our will should be accountable to justice. 
Which I say, as a man, who am neither judge nor privy coun- 
sellor, nor think myself, by many degrees, worthy so to be, 
but zman of the common sort, born and vowed to the obedience 
of the public realm, both in words and acts. 

' Thought is free ; — thought is free.' 

Ariel. 

1 Perceiving you to be ready and prepared on one part, I pro- 
pose to you on the other, with all the care I can, to clear 
your judgment, not to enforce it. Truly, / have not only a 
great many humours, but also a great many opinions [which I 
bring forward here, and assume as mine] that I would endeavour 
to make my son dislike, if I had one. The truest, are not 
always the most commodious to man; he is of too wild a 
composition. • We speak of all things by precept and resolu- 
tion,' he continues, returning again to this covert question 
of toleration, and Lord Bacon complains also that that is the 
method in his meridian. They make me hate things that 
are likely, when they impose them on me for infallible. 
'Wonder is the foundation of all philosophy' — (or, as Lord 
Bacon expresses it, ' wonder is the seed of knowledge') — en- 
quiry the progress — ignorance the end. Ay, but there is 
a sort of ignorance, strong and generous, that yields nothing in 
honour and courage to knowledge, a knowledge, which to con- 
ceive, requires no less knowledge than knowledge itself.' 

4 1 saw, in my younger days, a report of a process that Corras, 
a counsellor of Thoulouse, put in print.' — [The vain, egotistical, 
incoherent, rambling old Frenchman, the old Roman Catholic 
French gentleman, who is understood to be the author of this 
new experiment in letters, was not far from being a middle- 
aged man, when the pamphlet which he here alludes to was 



MICHAEL DE MONTAIGNE. 37 

first published ; but bis chronology, generally, does not bear a 
very close examination. Some very extraordinary anachronisms, 
which the critics are totally at a loss to account for, have some- 
how slipped into his story. There was a young philosopher in 
France in those days, of a most precocious, and subtle, and in- 
ventive genius — of a most singularly artistic genius, combining 
speculation and practice, as they had never been combined 
before, and already busying himself with all sorts of things, 
and among other things, with curious researches in regard to 
ciphers, and other questions not less interesting at that time; 
— there was a youth in France, whose family name was also 
English, living there with his eyes wide open, a youth who had 
found occasion to invent a cipher of his own even then, into 
whose hands that publication might well have fallen on its first 
appearance, and one on whose mind it might very naturally 
have made the impression here recorded. But let us return 
to the story.] — ' I saw in my younger days, a report of 
a process, that Corras, a counsellor of Thoulouse, put in print, 
of a strange accident of two men, who presented themselves the one 
for the other. I remember, and 1 hardly remember anything 
else, that he seemed to have rendered the imposture of him 
whom he judged to he guilty, so wonderful, and so far exceeding 
both our knowledge and his who was the judge, that / thought it a 
very hold sentence that condemned him to be hanged. [That is the 
point]. Let us take up SOME FORM of arrest, that shall 
say, the COURT understands nothing of the matter, more freely 
and ingenuously than the Areopagites did, who ordered the 
parties to appear again in a hundred years.' 1 We must not for- 
get that these stories 'are not regarded by the author merely 
for the use he makes of them, — that they carry, besides what 
he applies them to, the seeds of a richer and bolder matter, 
and sometimes collaterally a more delicate sound, both to the 
author himself who declines saying anything more about it in 
that place, and to others who shall happen to be of his ear !' One 
already prepared by previous discovery of the method of com- 
munication here indicated, and by voluminous readings in it, to 
understand that appeal, begs leave to direct the attention of 



38 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

the critical reader to the delicate collateral sounds in the 
story last quoted. 

It is not irrelevant to notice that this story is introduced to 
the attention of the reader, ' who will, perhaps, see farther into 
it than others,' in that chapter on toleration in which it is 
suggested that considering the fantastic, and unscientific, and 
unsettled character of the human beliefs and opinions, and that 
even ' the Fathers' have suggested in their speculations on the 
nature of human life, that what men believed themselves 
to be, in their dreams, they really became, it is after all setting 
a man's conjectures at a very high price to cause a man to be 
roasted alive on them ; the chapter in which it is intimated 
that considering the natural human liability to error, a little 
more room for correction of blunders, a little larger chance of 
arriving at the common truth, a little more chance for growth 
and advancement in learning, would, perhaps, on the whole, 
be likely to conduce to the human welfare, instead of sealing up 
the human advancement for ever, with axe and cord and stake 
and rack, within the limits of doctrines which may have been, 
perhaps, the very wisest, the most learned, of which the world 
was capable, at the time when their form was determined. It 
is the chapter which he calls fancifully, a chapter ' on cripples, ' 
into which this odd story about the two men who presented 
themselves, the one for the other, in a manner so remarkable, 
is introduced, for lameness is always this author's grievance, 
wherever we find him, and he is driven to all sorts of devices 
to overcome it; for he is the person who came prepared to 
speak well, and who hates that sort of speaking, where a man 
reads his speech, because he is one who could naturally give 
it a grace by action, or as another has it, he is one who would 
suit the action to the word. 

But it was not the question of 'hanging' only, or 'roasting 
alive/ that authors had to consider with themselves in these 
times. For those forms of literary production which an author's 
literary taste, or his desire to reach and move and mould the 
people, might incline him to select — the most approved 
forms of popular literature, were in effect forbidden to men, 



MICHAEL DE MONTAIGNE. 39 

bent, as these men were, on taking an active part in the 
affairs of their time. Any extraordinary reputation for excel- 
lence in these departments, would hardly have tended to 
promote the ambitious views of the young aspirant for honors 
in that school of states manship, in which the 'Fairy Queen* 
had been scornfully dismissed, as 'an old song.' Even that 
disposition to the gravest and profoundest forms of philoso- 
phical speculation, which one foolish young candidate for ad- 
vancement was indiscreet enough to exhibit prematurely there, 
was made use of so successfully to his disadvantage, that for 
years his practical abilities were held in suspicion on that very 
account, as he complains. The reputation of a Philosopher in 
those days was quite as much as this legal practitioner was 
willing to undertake for his part. That of a Poet might have 
proved still more uncomfortable, and more difficult to sustain. 
His claim to a place in the management of affairs would not 
have been advanced by it, in the eyes of those old statesmen, 
whose favour he had to propitiate. However, he was happily 
relieved from any suspicion of that sort. If those paraphrases 
of the Psalms for which he chose to make himself responsible, — 
if those Hebrew melodies of his did not do the business for 
him, and clear him effectually of any such suspicion in the 
eyes of that generation, it is difficult to say what would. But 
whether his devotional feelings were really of a kind to require 
any such painful expression as that on their own account, may 
reasonably be doubted by any one acquainted at all with his 
general habits of thought and sentiment. These lyrics of the 
philosopher appear on the whole to prove too much; looked 
at from a literary point of view merely, they remind one for- 
cibly of the attempts of Mr. Silence at a Bacchanalian song. 
' I have a reasonable good ear in music,' says the unfortunate 
Pyramus, struggling a little with that cerebral development 
and uncompromising facial angle which he finds imposed on 
him. ' I have a reasonable good ear in music : let us have the 
tongs and the bones.' 

' A man must frame some probable cause, why he should not 
do his best, and why he should dissemble his abilities,' says 



40 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

this author, speaking of colour, or the covering of defects; and 
that the prejudice just referred to was not peculiar to the 
English court, the remarkable piece of dramatic criticism 
which we are about to produce from this old Gascon philoso- 
pher's pages, may or may not indicate, according as it is inter- 
preted. It serves as an introduction to the passage in which 
the author's double meaning, and the occasionally double sound 
of his stories is noted. In the preceding chapter, it should be 
remarked, however, the author has been discoursing in high 
strains, upon the vanity of popular applause, or of any applause 
but that of reason and conscience; sustaining himself with 
quotations from the Stoics, whose doctrines on this point he 
assumes as the precepts of a true and natural philosophy; 
and among others the following passage was quoted : — * 
1 Remember him who being asked why he took so much pains 
in an art that could come to the knowledge of but few per- 
sons, replied, • A few are enough for me. I have enough with 
one, I have enough with never a one.' He said true; yourself 
and a companion are theatre enough to one another, or you to 
yourself. Let us be to you the whole people, and the whole 
people to you but one. You should do like the beasts of chase 
who efface the track at the entrance into their den.' But this 
author's comprehensive design embraces all the oppositions in 
human nature; he thinks it of very little use to preach to 
men from the height of these lofty philosophic nights, unless 
you first dive down to the platform of their actualities, and by 
beginning with the secret of what they are, make sure that 
you take them with you. So then the latent human vanity, 
must needs be confessed, and instead of taking it all to himself 
this time, poor Cicero and Pliny are dragged up, the latter 
very unjustly, as the commentator complains, to stand the 
brunt of this philosophic shooting. 

' But this exceeds all meanness of spirit in persons of such 
quality as they were, to think to derive any glory from babbling 
and prating, even to the making use of their private letters to 

* Taken from an epiatle of Seneca, but including a quotation from a 
letter of Epicurus, on the same subject. 



MICHAEL DE MONTAIGNE. 4 1 

their friends, an-J so withal that though some of them were never 
sent, the opportunity being lost, they nevertheless published 
them ; with this worthy excuse, that they were unwilling to 
lose their labour, and have their lucubrations thrown away. — 
Was" it not well becoming two consuls of Rome, sovej'eign 
magistrates of the republic, that commanded the world, to spend 
their time in patching up elegant missives, in order to gain 
the reputation of being well versed in their own mother tongue? 
What could a pitiful schoolmaster have done worse, who got 
his living by it? If the acts of Xenophon and Caesar had not 
far transcended their eloquence, I don't believe they would 
ever have taken the pains to write them. They made it their 
business to recommend not their saying, but their doing. The 
companions of Demosthenes in the embassy to Philip, extolling 
that prince as handsome, eloquent, and a stout drinker, De- 
mosthenes said that those were commendations more proper 
for a woman, an advocate, or a sponge. 'Tis not his profession 
to know either how to hunt, or to dance well. 

Orabunt causas alii, coelique meatus 
Describent radio, et fulgentia sidera dicent, 
Hie regere imperio populos sciat. 

Plutarch says, moreover, that to appear so excellent in these 
less necessary qualities, is to produce witness against a man's 
self, that he has spent his time and study ill, which ought to 
have been employed in the acquisition of more necessary and 
more useful things. Thus Philip, King of Macedon, having 
heard the great Alexander, his son, sing at a feast to the wonder 
and envy of the best musicians there. ' Art thou not ashamed,' 
he said to him, ' to sing so wellV And to the same Philip, a 
musician with whom he was disputing about something con- 
cerning his art, said, ' Heaven forbid, sir, that so great a mis- 
fortune should ever befall you as to understand these things better 
than I. Perhaps this author might have made a similar reply, 
had his been subjected to a similar criticism. And Lord 
Bacon quotes this story too, as he does many others, which 
this author has first selected, and for the same purpose; for, not 
content with appropriating his philosophy, and pretending to 



42 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

invent his design and his method, he borrows all his most sig- 
nificant stories from him, and brings them in to illustrate the 
same points, and the points are borrowed also : he makes use, 
indeed, of his common-place book throughout in the most 
shameless and unconscionable manner. 'Rack his style, 
Madam, rack his style,' he said to Queen Elizabeth, as he tells 
us, when she consulted him — he being then of her counsel 
learned, in the case of Dr. Hayward, charged with having 
written ' the book of the deposing of Richard the Second, and 
the coming in of Henry the Fourth/ and sent to the Tower 
for that offence. The queen was eager for a different kind of 
advice. Racking an author's book did not appear to her 
coarse sensibilities, perfectly unconscious of the delicacy of an 
author's susceptibilities, a process in itself sufficiently murderous 
to satisfy her revenge. There must be some flesh and blood 
in the business before ever she could understand it. She 
wanted to have ' the question' put to that gentleman as to his 
meaning in the obscure passages in that work under the most 
impressive circumstances; and Mr. Bacon, himself an author, 
being of her counsel learned, was requested to make out a case of 
treason for her; and wishes from such a source were understood 
to be commands in those days. Now it happened that one of 
the managers and actors at the Globe Theatre, who was at 
that time sustaining, as it would seem, the most extraordinary 
relations of intimacy and friendship with the friends and 
patrons of this same person, then figuring as the queen's ad- 
viser, had recently composed a tragedy on this very subject; 
though that gentleman, more cautious than Dr. Hayward, and 
having, perhaps, some learned counsel also, had taken the pre- 
caution to keep back the scene of the deposing of royalty 
during the life-time of this sharp-witted queen, reserving its 
publication for the reign of her erudite successor; and the 
learned counsel in this case being aware of the fact, may have 
felt some sympathy with this misguided author. ' No, 
madam,' he replied to her inquiry, thinking to take, off her 
bitterness with a merry conceit, as he says, ' for treason I can 
not deliver opinion that there is any, but very much felony.' 






MICHAEL DE MONTAIGNE. 43 

The queen apprehending it gladly, asked, 'How?' and 
' wherein V Mr. Bacon answered, ' Because he had stolen 
many of his sentences and conceits out of Cornelius Tacitus.' 
It would do one good to see, perhaps, how many felonious 
appropriations of sentences, and quotations, and ideas, the 
application he recommends would bring to light in this case. 

But the instances already quoted are not the only ones 
which this free spoken foreign writer, this Elizabethan genius 
abroad, ventures to adduce in support of this position of his, 
that statesmen — men who aspire to the administration of re- 
publics or other forms of government — if they cannot consent 
on that account to relinquish altogether the company of the 
Muses, must at least so far respect the prevailing opinion on 
that point, as to be able to sacrifice to it the proudest literary 
honours. Will the reader be pleased to 'notice, not merely 
the extraordinary character of the example in this instance, 
but the grounds of the assumption which the critic makes with 
so much coolness. 

'And could the perfection of eloquence have added any 
lustre proportionable to the merit of a great person, certainly 
Scipio and Lselius had never resigned the honour of their 
comedies, with all the luxuriancies and delicacies of the Latin 
tongue, to an African slave, for that the work was THEIRS its 
beauty and excellency sufficiently prove : * besides Te- 
rence himself confesses as much, and / should take it ill in 
any one that would dispossess me of that belief? For, as he says 
in another place, in a certain deeply disguised dedication which 
he makes of the work of a friend, a poet, whose early death 
he greatly lamented, and whom he is ' determined,' as he says, 
' to revive and raise again to life if he can : 'As we often judge 
of the greater by the less, and as the very pastimes of great 
men give an honourable idea to the clear-sighted of the source 
from which they spring, I hope you will, by this work of his, 
rise to the knowledge of himself, and by consequence love and 

* This is from a book in which the supposed autograph of Shakspere 
is found ; a work from which he quotes incessantly, and from which he 
appears, indeed, to have taken the whole hint of his learning. 



44 TlBE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

embrace his memory. In so doing, you will accomplish what 
he exceedingly longed for whilst he lived.' But here he con- 
tinues thus, ' I have, indeed, in my time known some, who, 
by a knack of writing, have got both title and fortune, yet 
disown their apprenticeship, purposely corrupt their style, and 
affect ignorance of so vulgar a quality (which also our nation 
observes, rarely to be seen in very learned hands), carefully seek- 
ing a reputation by better qualities.' 

I once did hold it, as our statists do, a baseness to write fair : 
but now it did me yeoman's service. — Bamlet. 

And it is in the next paragraph to this, that he takes occasion 
to mention that his stories and allegations do not always serve 
simply for example, authority, or ornament; that they are not 
limited in their application to the use he ostensibly makes of 
them, but that they carry, for those who are in his secret, other 
meanings, bolder and richer meanings, and sometimes collate- 
rally a more delicate sound. And having interrupted the con- 
sideration upon Cicero and Pliny, and their vanity and pitiful 
desire for honour in future ages, with this criticism on the 
limited sphere of statesmen in general, and the devices to 
which Lalius and Scipio were compelled to resort, in order to 
get their plays published without diminishing the lustre of 
their personal renown, and having stopped to insert that most 
extraordinary avowal in regard to his two-fold meanings in 
his allegations and stories, he returns to the subject of this 
correspondence again, for there is more in this also than meets 
the ear; and it is not Pliny, and Cicero only, whose supposed 
vanity, and regard for posthumous fame, as men of letters, is 
under consideration. ' But returning to the speaking virtue/ 
he says, 'I find no great choice between not knowing to speak 
anything but ill, and not knowing anything but speaking well. 
The sages tell us, that as to what concerns knowledge there is 
nothing but philosophy, and as to what concerns effects nothing 
but virtue, that is generally proper to all degrees and orders. 
There is something like this in these two other philosophers, 
for they also promise eternity to the letters they write to 
their friends, but 'tis after another manner, and by accommo- 



MICHAEL DE MONTAIGNE. 45 

dating themselves for a good end to the vanity of another ; for 
they write to them that if the concern of making themselves 
known to future ages, and the thirst of glory, do yet detain 
them in the management of public affairs, and make them fear 
the solitude and retirement to which they would persuade 
them; let them never trouble themselves more about it, for- 
asmuch as they shall have credit enough with posterity to 
assure them that, were there nothing else but the letters thus 
writ to them, those letters will render their names as known 
and famous as their own public actions themselves could do. 
[And that — that is the key to the correspondence between two 
other philosophers enigmatically alluded to here.] And be- 
sides this difference,' for it is ' these two other philosophers,' 
and not Pliny and Cicero, and not Seneca and Epicurus alone, 
that we talk of here, ' and besides this difference, these are not 
idle and empty letters, that contain nothing but a fine jingle of 
well chosen words, and fine couched phrases; but replete and 
abounding with grave and learned discourses, by which a man 
may render himself — not more eloquent but more ivise, and 
that instruct us not to speak but to do welP; for that is the 
rhetorical theory that was adopted by the scholars and states- 
men then alive, whose methods of making themselves known 
to future as;es he is indicating;, even in these references to the 
ancients. ''Away with that eloquence which so enchants us with 
its harmony that we should more study it than thing £ ; for 
this is the place where the quotation with which our investi- 
gation of this theory commenced is inserted in the text, and 
here it is, in the light of these preceding collections of hints 
that he puts in the story first quoted, wherein he says, the 
nature of the orator will be much more manifestly laid open 
to us, than in that seeming care for his fame, or in that care 
of his style, for its own sake. It is the story of Eros, the 
slave, who brought the speaker word that the audience was 
deferred, when in composing a speech that he was to make in 
public, ' he found himself straitened in time, to fit his words to 
his mouth as he had a mind to do.' 



46 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE POSSIBILITY OF GREAT ANONYMOUS WORKS, — OR 
WORKS PUBLISHED UNDER AN ASSUMED NAME, CON- 
VEYING, UNDER RHETORICAL DISGUISES, THE PRINCIPAL 
SCIENCES, RE-SUGGESTED, AND ILLUSTRATED. 

Is the storm overblown? I hid me under the dead moon-calf's 
gaberdine for fear of the storm. — Tempest. 

T>UT as to this love of glory which the stoics, whom this 
-*-* philosopher quotes so approvingly, have measured at its 
true worth ; as to this love of literary fame, this hankering 
after an earthly immortality, which he treats so scornfully in 
the Roman statesman, let us hear him again in another chap- 
ter, and see if we can find any thing whereby his nature and 
designs will more manifestly be laid open to us. ' Of all the 
foolish dreams in the world/ he says, ' that which is most 
universally received, is the solicitude of reputation and glory, 
which we are fond of to that degree as to abandon riches, 
peace, life, and health, which are effectual and substantial 
good, to pursue this vain phantom. And of all the irrational 
humours of men, it should seem that the philosophers them- 
selves have the most ado, and do the least disengage themselves 
from this the most restive and obstinate of all the follies. 
There is not any one view of which reason does so clearly 
accuse the vanity, as that; but it is so deeply rooted in us, that 
I doubt whether any one ever clearly freed himself from it, or 
no. After you have said all, and believed all that has been 
said to its prejudice, it creates so intestine an inclination in 
opposition to your best arguments, that you have little power 
and firmness to resist it; for {as Cicero says) even those who 
controvert it, would yet that the books they write should appear 
before the world with their names in the title page, and seek 
to derive glory from seeming to despise it. All other things are 



MICHAEL DE MONTAIGNE. 47 

« 

communicable and fall into commerce; we lend our goods — 

[It irks me not that men my garments wear.] 
and stake our lives for the necessities and service of our 
friends; but to communicate one's honour, and to robe another 
with one's own glory, is very rarely seen. And yet we have 
some examples of that kind. Catulus Luctatius, in the 
Cymbrian war, having done all that in him lay to make his 
flying soldiers face about upon the enemy, ran himself at last 
away tuith the rest, and counterfeited the coward, to the end that 
his men might rather seem to follow their captain, than to fly 
from the enemy ;' and after several anecdotes full of that inner 
significance of which he speaks elsewhere, in which he ap- 
pears, but only appears, to lose sight of this question of literary 
honour, for they relate to military conflicts, he ventures to 
approach, somewhat cautiously and delicately, the latent point 
of his essay again, by adducing the example of persons, not 
connected with the military profession, who have found them- 
selves called upon in various ways, and by means of various 
weapons, to take part in these wars ; who have yet, in conse- 
quence of certain ' subtleties of conscience,' relinquished the 
honour of their successes; and though there is no instance ad- 
duced of that particular kind of disinterestedness, in which an 
author relinquishes to another the honour of his title page, as 
the beginning might have led one to anticipate; on the 
whole, the not indiligent reader of this author's performances 
here and elsewhere, will feel that the subject which is an- 
nounced as the subject of this chapter, ' Not to communicate 
a man's honour or glory,' has been, considering the circum- 
stance, sufficiently illustrated. 

'As women succeeding to peerages had, notwithstanding their 
sex, the right to assist and give their votes in the causes that 
appertain to the jurisdiction of peers; so the ecclesiastical 
peers, notwithstanding their profession, were obliged to assist 
our kings in their wars, not only with their friends and ser- 
vants, but in their own persons. And he instances the Bishop 
of Beauvais, who took a gallant share in the battle of Bouvines, 
but did not think it fit for him to participate in the fruit and 



48 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

• 

glory of that violent and bloody trade. He, with his own hand, 
reduced several of the enemy that day to his mercy, whom he 
delivered to the first gentleman he met, either to kill or to 
receive them to quarter, referring that part to another hand. 
As also did William, Earl of Salisbury, to Messire John de 
Neale, with a like subtlety of conscience to the other, he 
would kill, hut NOT wound him, and for that reason, fought 
only with a mace. And a certain person in my time, being 
reproached by the king that he had laid hands on a priest, 
stiffly and positively denied it. The case was, he had cudgelled 
and kicked him.' And there the author abruptly, for that time, 
leaves the matter without any allusion to the case of still another 
kind of combatants, who, fighting with another kind of weapon, 
might also, from similar subtleties of conscience, perhaps think 
fit to devolve on others the glory of their successes. 

But in a chapter on names, in which, if he has not told, he 
has designed to tell all ; and what he could not express, he has 
at least pointed out with his finger, this subject is more fully 
developed. In this chapter, he regrets that such as write 
chronicles in Latin do not leave our names as they find them, 
for in making of Vaudemont Valle-Montanus, and meta- 
morphosing names to dress them out in Greek or Latin, we 
know not where we are, and with the persons of the men, lose 
the benefit of the story : but one who tracks the inner thread 
of this apparently miscellaneous collection of items, need be at 
no such loss in this case. But at the conclusion of this apparently 
very trivial talk about names, he resumes his philosophic hu- 
mour again, and the subsequent discourse on this subject, recals 
once more, the considerations with which philosophy sets at 
nought the loss of fame, and forgets in the warmth that prompts 
to worthy deeds, the glory that should follow them. 

1 But this consideration — that is the consideration ' that it 
is the custom in France, to call every man, even a stranger, by 
the name of any manor or seigneury, he may chance to come in 
possession of, tends to the total confusion of descents, so that 
surnames are no security/ — 'for/ he says, 'a younger brother 
of a good family, having a manor left him by his father, by 



MICHAEL DE MONTAIGNE. 49 

the name of which he has been known and honoured, cannot 
handsomely leave it; ten years after his decease, it falls into 
the hand of a stranger, who does the same. Do but judge 
whereabouts we shall be concerning the knowledge of these 
men. This consideration leads me therefore into another 
subject. Let us look a little more narrowly into, and examine 
upon what foundation we erect this glory and reputation, for 
which the world is turned topsy-turvy. Wherein do we place 
this renown, that we hunt after with such infinite anxiety and 
trouble. It is in the end Pierre or William that bears it, 
takes it into his possession, and whom only it concerns. Oh 
what a valiant faculty is Hope, that in a mortal subject, and 
in a moment, makes nothing of usurping infinity, immensity, 
eternity, and of supplying her master's indigence, at her pleasure, 
with all things that he can imagine or desire. And this Pierre 
or William, what is it but a sound, when all is done, [' What's 
in a name?'] or three or four dashes with a pen?' 

And he has already written two paragraphs to show, that 
the name of William, at least, is not excepted from the 
general remarks he is making here on the vanity of names; 
while that of Pierre is five times repeated, apparently with 
the same general intention, and another combination of sounds 
is not wanting which serves with that free translation the 
author himself takes pains to suggest and defend, to com- 
plete what was lacking to that combination, in order to give 
these remarks their true point and significance, in order to 
redeem them from that appearance of flatness which is not a 
characteristic of this author's intentions, and in his style 
merely serves as an intimation to the reader that there is 
something worth looking for beneath it. 

As to the name of William, and the amount of personal 
distinction which that confers upon its owners, he begins by 
telling us, that the name of Guienne is said to be derived from 
the Williams of our ancient Aquitaine, ' which would seem, he 
says, rather far fetched, were there not as crude derivations in Plato 
himself, to whom he refers in other places for similar precedents ; 
and when he wishes to excuse his enigmatical style — the titles 

E 



50 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

of his chapters for instance. And by way of emphasizing 
this particular still further, he mentions, that on the occasion 
when Henry, the Duke of Normandy, the son of Henry the 
Second, of England, made a feast in France, the concourse of 
nobility and gentry was so great, that for sport's sake he divided 
them into troops, according to their names, and in the, first troop, 
which consisted of Williams, there were found a hundred and 
ten knights sitting at the table of that name, without reckoning 
the simple gentlemen and servants. 

And here he apparently digresses from his subject for the 
sake of mentioning the Emperor Geta, ' who distributed the 
several courses of his meats by the first letters of the meats 
themselves, where those that began with B were served up 
together; as brawn, beef, beccaficos, and so of the others/ 
This appears to be a little out of the way; but it is not impos- 
sible that there may be an allusion in it to the author's own 
family name of Eyquem, though that would be rather far- 
fetched, as he says; but then there is Plato at hand, still to 
keep us in countenance. 

But to return to the point of digression. ' And this Pierre, 
or William, what is it but a sound when all is done? Or 
three or four dashes with a pen, so easy to be varied, that I 
would fain know to whom is to be attributed the glory of so 
many victories, to Guesquin, to Glesquin, or to Gueaguin. And 
yet there would be something more in the case than in Lucian 
that Sigma . should serve Tau with a process, for ' He seeks 
no mean rewards.' The quere is here in good earnest. The point 
is, which of these letters is to be rewarded for so many sieges, 
battles, wounds, imprisonment, and services done to the crown 
of France by this famous constable. Nicholas Denisot never 
concerned himself further than the letters of his name, of 
which he has altered the whole contexture, to build up by ana- 
gram the Count d'Alsinois whom he has endowed with the glory 
of his poetry and painting. [A good precedent — but here is a 
better one.] And the historian Suetonius looked only to the 
meaning of his ; and so, cashiering his fathers surname, Lenis 
left Tranquillus successor to the reputation of his writings. Who 



MICHAEL DE MONTAIGNE. 5 1 

would believe that the Captain Bayard should have no honour 
but what he derives from the great deeds of Peter (Pierre), 
Terrail, [the name of Bayard — ' the meaning''] and that Antonio 
Escalin should suffer himself, to his face, to be robbed of the 
honour of so many navigations, and commands at sea and land, 
by Captain Poulin and the Baron de la Garde. [The name of 
Poulin was taken from the place where he was born, De la 
Garde from a person who took him in his boyhood into his 
service.] Who hinders my groom from calling himself Pom- 
pey the Great? But, after all, what virtue, what springs are 
there that convey to my deceased groom, or the other Pompey 
(who had his head cut off in Egypt), this glorious renown, and 
these so much honoured flourishes of the pen?' Instructive 
suggestions, especially when taken in connection with the pre- 
ceding items contained in this chapter, apparently so casually 
introduced, yet all with a stedfast bearing on. this question of 
names, and all pointing by means of a thread of delicate 
sounds, and not less delicate suggestions, to another instance, 
in which the possibility of circumstances tending to counter- 
vail the so natural desire to appropriate to the name derived 
from one's ancestors, the lustre of one's deeds, is clearly demon- 
strated. 

"Tis with good reason that men decry the hypocrisy that is 
in war; for what is more easy to an old soldier than to shift 
in time of danger, and to counterfeit bravely, when he has no 
more heart than a chicken. There are so many ways to avoid 
hazarding a man's own person ' — ' and had we the use of the 
Platonic ring, which renders those invisible that wear it, if 
turned inwards towards the palm of the hand, it is to be feared 
that a great many would often hide themselves, when they ought 
most to ajypear. 1 ' It seems that to be known, is in some sort to 
have a mans life and its duration in another's keeping. I for 
my part, hold that I am wholly in myself, and that other life 
of mine which lies in the knowledge of my friends, considering 
it nakedly and simply in itself, I know very well that I am 
sensible of no fruit or enjoyment of it but by the vanity of a 
fantastic opinion; and, when I shall be dead, I shall be much 

E 2 



52 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

less sensible of it, and shall withal absolutely lose the use of 
those real advantages that sometimes accidentally follow it. 
[That was Lord Bacon's view, too, exactly.] I shall have no 
more handle whereby to take hold of reputation, or whereby 
it may take hold of me : for to expect that my name should 
receive it, in the first place, I have no name that is enough 
my own. Of two that I have, one is common to all my race, 
and even to others also: there is one family at Paris, and 
another at Montpelier, whose surname is Montaigne; another 
in Brittany, and Xaintonge called De la Montaigne. The 
transposition of one syllable only is enough to ravel our affairs, 
so that I shall peradventure share in their glory, and they 
shall partake of my shame; and, moreover, my ancestors were 
formerly surnamed Eyquem, a name wherein a family well 
known in England at this day is concerned. As to my other 
name, any one can take it that will, and so, perhaps, I may 
honour a porter in my own stead. And, besides, though I 
had a particular distinction myself, what can it distinguish 
when I am no more. Can it point out and favour inanity? 

But will thy manes such a gift bestow- 
As to make violets from thy ashes grow 1 

But of this I have spoken elsewhere.' He has — and to pur- 
pose. 

But as to the authority for these readings, Lord Bacon him- 
self will give us that ; for this is the style which he discrimi- 
nates so sharply as ' the enigmatical, 1 a style which he, too, 
finds to have been in use among the ancients, and which he 
tells us has some affinity with that new method of making over 
knowledges from the mind of the teacher to that of the pupil, 
which he terms the method of progression — (which is the method 
of essaie) — in opposition to the received method, the only 
method he finds in use, which he, too, calls the magisterial. 
And this method of progression, with which the enigmatical 
has some affinity, is to be used, he tells us, in cases where 
knowledge is delivered as a thread to be spun on, where 
science is to be removed from one mind to another to grow 



MICHAEL DE MONTAIGNE. 53 

from the root, and not delivered as trees for the use of the 
carpenter, where the root is of no consequence. In this 
case, he tells us it is necessary for the teacher to descend 
to the foundations of knowledge and consent, and so to transplant 
it into another as it grew in his own mind, 'whereas as 
knowledges are now delivered, there is a kind of contract of 
error between the deliverer and the receiver, for he that 
delivereth knowledge desireth to deliver it in such a form as 
may best be believed, and not as may best be examined : and he 
that receiveth knowledge desireth rather present satisfaction 
than expectant inquiry, and so rather not to doubt than not to 
err, glory making the author not to lay open his weakness, 
and sloth making the disciple not to know his strength.' Now, 
so very grave a defect as this, in the method of the delivery 
and tradition of Learning, would of course be one of the first 
things that would require to be remedied in any plan in which 
'the Advancement '' of it was seriously contemplated. And this 
method of the delivery and tradition of knowledges which 
transfers the root with them, that they may grow in the mind 
of the learner, is the method which this philosopher professes 
to find wanting, and the one which he seems disposed to in- 
vent. He has made a very thorough survey of the stores of 
the ancients, and is not unacquainted with the more recent 
history of learning; he<knows exactly what kinds of methods 
have been made use of by the learned in all ages, for the pur- 
pose of putting themselves into some tolerable and possible 
relations with the physical majority; he knows what devices 
they have always been compelled to resort to, for the purpose of 
establishing seme more or less effective communication between 
themselves and that world to which they instinctively seek to 
transfer their doctrine. But this method, which he suggests 
here as the essential condition of the growth and advancement 
of learning, he does not find invented. He refers to a method 
which he calls the enigmatical, which has an affinity with it, 
' used in some cases by the discretion of the ancients,' but dis- 
graced since, ' by the impostures of persons, who have made it 
as a false light for their counterfeit merchandises.' The pur- 



54 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

pose of this latter style is, as lie defines it, ' to remove the 
secrets of knowledges from the penetration of the more vulgar 
capacities, and to reserve them to selected auditors, or to wits 
of such sharpness as can pierce the veil.' And that is a me- 
thod, he tells us, which philosophy can by no means dispense 
with in his time, and ' whoever would let in new light upon 
the human understanding must still have recourse to it/ But 
the method of delivery and tradition in those ancient schools, 
appears to have been too much of the dictatorial kind to suit 
this proposer of advancement ; its tendency was to arrest know- 
leges instead of promoting their growth. He is not pleased 
with the ambition of those old masters, and thinks they aimed 
too much at a personal impression, and that they sometimes 
undertook to impose their own particular and often very 
partial grasp of those universal doctrines and principles, 
which are and must be true for all men, in too dogmatical and 
magisterial a manner, without making sufficient allowance 
for the growth of the mind of the world, the difference of 
races, etc. 

But if any doubt in regard to the use of the method de- 
scribed, in the composition of the work now first produced as 
an example of the use of it, should still remain in any mind ; 
or if this method of unravelling it should seem too studious, 
perhaps the author's own word for it in one more quotation 
may be thought worth taking. 

' / can give no account of my life by my actions, fortune 
has placed them too low ; / must do it by MY FANCIES. And 
when shall I have done representing the continual agitation 
and change of my thoughts as they come into my head, 
seeing that Diomedes filled six thousand books upon the sub- 
ject of grammar/ [The commentators undertake to set him 
right here, but the philosopher only glances in his intention 
at the voluminousness of the science of words, in opposition 
to the science of things, which he came to establish.] ' What 
must prating produce, since prating itself, and the first be- 
ginning to speak, stuffed the world with such a horrible load 
of volumes. So many words about words only. They accused 



MICHAEL DE MONTAIGNE. 55 

one Galba, of old, of living idly; he made answer that every 
one ought to give account of his actions, but not of his leisure. 
He was mistaken, for justice — [the civil authority] — has cogni- 
zance and jurisdiction over those that do nothing, or only PLAT 
at working .... Scribbling appears to be the sign of a dis- 
ordered age. Every man applies himself negligently to the 
duty of his vocation at such a time and debauches in it.' 
From that central wrong of an evil government, an infectious 
depravity spreads and corrupts all particulars. Everything 
turns from its true and natural course. Thus scribbling is the 
sign of a disordered age. Men write in such times instead 
of acting; and scribble, or seem to perhaps, instead of writing 
openly to purpose. 

And yet, again, that central, and so divergent, wrong is the 
result of each man's particular contribution, as he goes on to 
assert. ' The corruption of this age is made up by the par- 
ticular contributions of every individual man/ — 

He were no lion, were not Romans hinds. — Cassius. 

1 Some contribute treachery, others injustice, irreligion, tyranny, 
avarice and cruelty, according as they have power; the WEAKER 

SORT CONTRIBUTE FOLLY, VANITY, and IDLENESS, and of 

these I am one.' 

Ccesar. — He loves no plays as thou dost, Antony. 
Such men are dangerous. 

Or, as the same poet expresses it in another Koman play : — 

This double worship, 
Where one part does disdain with cause, the other 
Insult without all reason ; where gentry, title, wisdom 
Cannot conclude but by the yea and no 
Of general ignorance, — it must omit 
Real necessities — and give way the while 
To ud stable slightness ; purpose sq^barred, 
It follows, nothing is done to purpose. 

And that is made the plea for an attempt to overthrow the 
popular power, and to replace it with a government contain- 
ing the true head of the state, its nobility, its learning, its 
gentleness, its wisdom. 



56 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

But the essayist continues: — 'It seems as if it were the 
season for vain things when the hurtful oppress us; in a time 
when doing ill is common, to do nothing but what signifies 
nothing is a kind of commendation. ' Tis my comfort that / 
shall be one of the last that shall be called in question, — for 
it would be against reason to punish the less troublesome while 
we are infested with the greater. As the physician said to one 
who presented him his finger to dress, and who, as he per- 
ceived, had an ulcer in his lungs. ' Friend, it is not now time 
to concern yourself about your finger's ends/ And yet I saw 
some years ago, a person, whose name and memory I have in very 
great esteem, in the very height of our great disorders, when 
there was neither law nor justice put in execution, nor magistrate 
that performed his office, — no more than there is now, — publish 
I know not what pitiful reformations about clothes, cookery and 
law chicanery. These are amusements wherewith to feed a people 
that are ill used, to show that they are not totally forgotten. 
These others do the same, who insist upon stoutly defending 
the forms of speaking, dances and games to a people totally 
abandoned to all sorts of execrable vices — it is for the Spartans 
only to fall to combing and curling themselves, when they are 
just upon the point of running headlong into some extreme 
danger of their lives. 

For my part, I have yet a worse custom. I scorn to mend 
myself by halves. If my shoe go awry, I let my shirt and my 
cloak do so too: when I am out of order I feed on mischief. 
I abandon myself through despair, and let myself go towards 
the precipice, and as the saying is, throw the helve after the 
hatchet/ We should not need, perhaps, the aid of the ex- 
planations already quoted, to show us that the author does not 
confess this custom of his for the sake of commending it to 
the sense or judgment af the reader, — who sees it here for the 
first time it may be put into words or put on paper, who 
looks at it here, perhaps, for the first time objectively, from 
the critical stand-point which the review of another's con- 
fession creates; and though it may have been latent in the 
dim consciousness of his own experience, or practically de- 



MICHAEL DE MONTAIGNE. 57 

veloped, finds it now for the first time, collected from the 
phenomena of the blind, instinctive, human motivity, and put 
down on the page of science, as a principle in nature, in 
human nature also. 

But this is indeed a Spartan combing and curling, that the 
author is falling to, in the introductory flourishes (' diversions' 
as he calls them) of this great adventure, that his pen is out 
for now: he is indeed upon the point of running headlong 
into the fiercest dangers; — it is the state, the wretched, dis- 
eased, vicious state, dying apparently, yet full of teeth and 
mischief, that he is about to handle in his argument with 
these fine, lightsome, frolicsome preparations of his, without 
any perceptible ' mittens'; it is the heart of that political evil 
that his time groans with, and begins to find insufferable^ 
that he is going to probe to the quick with that so delicate 
weapon. It is a tilt against the block and the rack, and all 
the instruments of torture, that he is going to manage, as 
handsomely, and with as many sacrifices to the graces, as the 
circumstances will admit of. But the political situation which 
he describes so boldly (and we have already seen what it is) 
affects us here in its relation to the question of style only, 
and as the author himself connects it with the point of our 
inquiry. 

' A man may regret,' he says, ' the better times, but cannot 
fly from the present, we may wish for other magistrates, but 
we must, notwithstanding, obey those we have; and, perad- 
venture, it is more laudable to obey the bad than the good. 
So long as the image of the ancient and received laws of this 
monarchy shall shine in any corner of the kingdom, there will 
I be. If they happen, unfortunately, to thwart and contradict 
one another, so as to produce two factions of doubtful choice ' 

And my soul aches 
To know, [says Coriolanus] when two authorities are up, 
Neither supreme, how soon confusion 
May enter 'twixt the gap of both, and take 
The one by the other. 

— ' in this contingency I will willingly choose,' continues the 



58 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

other, ' to withdraw from the tempest, and in the meantime, 
nature or the hazards of war may lend me a helping hand. 
Betwixt Coesar and Pompey, I should soon and frankly have 
declared myself, but amongst the three robbers that came 
after, a man must needs have either hid himself, or have gone 
along with the current of the time, which I think a man may 
lawfully do, when reason no longer rules' ' Whither dost thou 
wandering go?' 

This medley is a little from my subject, I go out of my 
way but 't is rather by licence than oversight. My fancies/o//ow 
one another, but sometimes at a great distance, and look towards 
one another, but His with an oblique glance. I have read a 
dialogue of Plato of such a motley and fantastic compo- 
sition. The beginning was about love, and all the rest about 
rhetoric. They stick not (that is, the ancients) at these 
variations, and have a marvellous grace in letting themselves 
to be carried away at the pleasure of the winds; or at least 
to seem as if they were. The titles of my chapters do not 
always comprehend the whole matter, they often denote it 
by some mark only, as those other titles Andria Eunuchus, or 
these, Sylla, Cicero, Torquatus. I love a poetic march, by 
leaps and skips, 'tis an art, as Plato says, light, nimble; and 
a little demoniacal. There are places in Plutarch where he 
forgets his theme, where the proposition of his argument is 
only found incidentally, and stuffed throughout with foreign 
matter. Do but observe his meanders in the Demon of 
Socrates. How beautiful are his variations and digressions: 
and then most of all,when they seem to be fortuitous, [hear] and 
introduced for want of heed. 'Tis the indiligent reader that 
loses my subject — not I. There will always be found some 
words or other in a corner that are to the purpose, though it lie 
very close [that is the unfailing rule]. I ramble about indis- 
creetly and tumultously: my style and my wit wander at the 
same rate, [he wanders wittingly^] A little folly is desirable in 
him that will not be guilty of stupidity, say the precepts, and 
much more the examples of our masters. A thousand poets 
flag and languish after a prosaic manner ; but the best old 



MICHAEL DE MONTAIGNE. 59 

prose, and I strew it here up and down indifferently for verse, 
shines throughout with the vigor and boldness of poetry, and 
represents some air of its fury. Certainly, prose must yield 
the pre-eminence in speaking. ' The poet,' says Plato, ' when 
set upon the muse's tripod, pours out with fury, whatever 
comes into his mouth, like the pipe of a fountain, without 
considering and pausing upon what he says, and things come 
from him of various colors, of contrary substance, and with 
an irregular torrent: he himself (Plato) is all over poetical, 
and all the old theology (as the learned inform us) is poetry, 
and the first philosophy, is the origiual language of the 

g ° dS - 

I would have the matter distinguish itself; it sufficiently ■*- / 

shows where it changes, where it concludes, where it begins, and 
where it resumes, without interlacing it with words of connection, 
introduced for the relief of weak or negligent ears, and without 
commenting myself. Who is he that had not rather not be 
read at all, than after a drowsy or cursory manner ? Seeing I 
cannot fix the reader's attention by the weight of what I 
write, maneo male, if I should chance to do it by my intricacies. 
[Hear]. I mortally hate obscurity and would avoid it if I 
could. In such an employment, to whom you will not give an 
hour you will give nothing; and you do nothing for him for 
whom you only do, whilst you are doing something else. To 
which may be added, that I have, perhaps, some particular 
obligation to speak only by halves, to speak confusedly and 
discordantly.' 

But this is, perhaps, enough to show, in the way of direct 
assertion, that we have here, at least, a philosophical work com- 
posed in that style which Lord Bacon calls ' the enigmatical,' 
in which he tells us the secrets of knowledges are reserved for 
selected auditors, or wit3 of such sharpness as can pierce the 
veil; a style which he, too, tells us was sometimes used by 
the discretion of the ancients, though he does not specify- 
either Plutarch or Plato; in that place, and one which he 
introduces in connection with his new method of progression, 
in consequence of its having, as he tells us, some affinity with 



60 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

it, and that we have here also a specimen of that new method 
itself, by means of which knowledges are to be delivered as a 
thread to be spun on. 

But let us leave, for the present, this wondrous Gascon, 
though it is not very easy to do so, so long as we have our 
present subject in hand, — this philosopher, whose fancies look 
towards one another at such long, such very long distances, 
sometimes, though not always, with an oblique glance, who 
dares to depend so much upon the eye of his reader, and 
especially upon the reader of that ' far-off' age he writes to. It 
would have been indeed irrelevant to introduce the subject 
of this foreign work and its style in this connection without 
further explanation, but for the identity of political situation 
already referred to, and but for those subtle, interior, incessant 
connections with the higher writings of the great Elizabethan 
school, which form the main characteristic of this production. 
The fact, that this work was composed in the country in 
which the chief Elizabethan men attained their maturity, that 
it dates from the time in which Bacon was completing his 
education there, that it covers ostensibly not the period only, 
but the scenes and events of Ealeigh's six years campaigning 
there, as well as the fact alluded to by this author himself, 
in a passage already quoted, — the fact that there was a family 
then in England, very well known, who bore the surname of 
his ancestors, a family of the name of Eyquem, he tells us 
with whom, perhaps, he still kept up some secret corre- 
spondence and relations, the fact, too, which he mentions in 
his chapter on Names, that a surname in France is very 
easily acquired, and is not necessarily derived from one's 
ancestors, — that same chapter in which he adduces so many 
instances of men who, notwithstanding that inveterate innate 
love of the honour of one's own proper name, which is in men 
of genius still more inveterate, — have for one reason or another 
been willing to put upon anagrams, or synonyms, or borrowed 
names, all their honours, so that in the end it is William or Pierre 
who takes them into his possession, and bears them, or it's the 
name of ' an African slave' perhaps, or the name of a f groom ' 



MICHAEL DE MONTAIGNE. 6 1 

(promoted, it may be, to the rank of a jester, or even to that of a 
player,) that gets all the glory. All these facts, taken in con- 
nection with the conclusions already established, though insigni- 
ficant in themselves, will be found anything but that for the phi- 
losophical student who has leisure to pursue the inquiry. 

And though the latent meanings, in which the interior 
connections and identities referred to above are found, are not 
yet critically recognised, a latent national affinity and liking 
strong enough to pierce this thin, artificial, foreign exterior, 
appears to have been at work here from the first. For though 
the seed of the richer and bolder meanings from which the 
author anticipated his later harvest, could not yet be reached, 
that new form of popular writing, that effective, and viva- 
cious mode of communication with the popular mind on topics 
of common concern and interest, not heretofore recognised as fit 
subjects for literature, which this work offered to the world 
on its surface, was not long in becoming fruitful. But it was 
on the English mind that it began to operate first. It was in 
England, that it began so soon to develop the latent efficacies 
it held in germ, in the creation of that new and widening 
department in letters — that so new, so vast, and living de- 
partment of them, which it takes to-day all our reviews, and 
magazines, and journals, to cover. And the work itself has 
been from the first adopted, and appropriated here, as heartily 
as if it had been an indigenous production, some singularly 
distinctive product too, of the so deeply characterised English 
nationality. 

But it is time to leave this wondrous Gascon, this new 
1 Michael of the Mount,' this man who is ' con substantial with 
his book,' — this 'Man of the Mountain,' as he figuratively 
describes it. Let us yield him this new ascent, this new tri- 
umphant peak and pyramid in science, which he claims to 
have been the first to master, — the unity of the universal 
man, — the historical unity, — the universal human form, col- 
lected from particulars, not contemplatively abstracted, — the 
Inducted Man of the new philosophy. ' Authors,' he says, 
( have hitherto communicated themselves to the people by some 



62 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

particular and foreign mark; I, the first of any by my universal 
being, as Michael de Montaigne, I propose a life mean and 
without lustre : all moral philosophy is applied as well to a 
private life as to one of the greatest employment. Every man 
carries the entire form of the human condition. . . I, the first of 
any by my universal being, as Michael, — see the chapter on 
names, — ' as Michael de Montaigne." Let us leave him for 
the present, or attempt to, for it is not very easy to do so, so 
long as we have our present subject in hand. 

For, as we all know, it is from this idle, tattling, ram- 
bling old Gascon — it is from this outlandish looker-on of 
human affairs, that our Spectators and Eamblers and Idlers 
and Tattlers, trace their descent; and the Times, and the Ex- 
aminers, and the Observers, and the Spectators, and the Tri- 
bunes, and Independents, and all the Monthlies, and all the 
Quarterlies, that exercise so large a sway in human affairs 
to-day, are only following his lead; and the best of them 
have not been able as yet to leave him in the rear. But how 
it came to pass, that a man of this particular turn of mind, 
who belonged to the old party, and the times that were then 
passing away, should have felt himself -called upon to make 
this great signal for the human advancement, and how it 
happens that these radical connections with other works of 
that time, having the same general intention, are found in the 
work itself, — these are points which the future biographers of 
this old gentleman will perhaps find it for their interest to 
look to. And a little of that more studious kind of reading 
which he himself so significantly solicited, and in so many 
passages, will inevitably tend to the elucidation of them. 



THE BACONIAN RHETORIC. 



PAKT II. 

THE BACONIAN RHETORIC, OR THE METHOD OF 
PROGRESSION. 

4 The secrets of nature have not more gift in taciturnity.' 

Troilus and Cressida. 

1 1 did not think that Mr. Silence had been a man of this mettle.' 

Falstaff. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE 'BEGINNERS.' 

' Prospero. — Go bring the rabble, 
O'er whom I give thee power, here, to this place.' 

Tempest. 

"OUT though a foreign philosopher may venture to give us 
-*-^ the clue to it, perhaps, in the first instance, a little more 
roundly, it is not necessary that we should go the Mayor of 
Bordeaux, in order to ascertain on the highest possible authority, 
what kind of an art of communication, what kind of an art 
of delivery and tradition, men, in such circumstances, find 
themselves compelled to invent; — that is, if they would not 
be utterly foiled for the want of it, in their noblest purposes ; — 
we need not go across the channel to find the men themselves, 
to whom this art is a necessity, — men so convinced that they 
have a mission of instruction to their kind, that they will 
permit no temporary disabilities to divert them from their 
end, — men who must needs open their school, no matter 
what oppositions there may be, to be encountered, no matter 
what imposing exhibitions of military weapons may be going 
on just then, in their vicinity ; and though they should find 
themselves straitened in time, and not able to fit their words 
to their mouths as they have a mind to, though they should 
be obliged to accept the hint from the master in the Greek 
school, and take their tone from the ear of those to whom they 



64 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OP TRADITION. 

speak, though many speeches which would spend their use 
among the men then living would have to be inserted in their 
most enduring works with a private hint concerning that 
necessity, and a private reading of them for those whom it 
concerned; though the audience they are prepared to address 
should be deferred, though the benches of the inner school 
should stand empty for ages. We need not go abroad at all 
to discover men of this stamp, and their works and pastimes, 
and their arts of tradition ; — men so filled with that which 
impels men to speak, that speak they must, and speak they 
will, in one form or another, by word or gesture, by word or 
deed, though they speak to the void waste, though they must 
speak till they reach old ocean in his unsunned caves, and 
bring him up with the music of their complainings, though 
the marble Themis fling back their last appeal, though they 
speak to the tempest in his wrath, to the wind and the rain, 
and the fire and the thunder, — men so impregnated with that 
which makes the human speech, that speak they will, though 
they have but a rusty nail, wherewith to etch their story, on 
their dungeon wall; though they dig in the earth and bury 
their secret, as one buried his of old — that same secret still; 
for it is still those ears — those 'ears' that 'Midas hath' 
which makes the mystery. 

They know that the days are coming -when the light will 
enter their prison house, and flash in its dimmest recess; when 
the light they sought in vain, will be there to search out the 
secrets they are forbid. They know that the day is coming, 
when the disciple himself, all tutored in the art of their tradi- 
tion, bringing with him the key of its delivery, shall be there 
to unlock those locked-up meanings, to spell out those anagrams 
to read those hieroglyphics, to unwind with patient loving 
research to its minutest point, that text, that with such tools 
as the most watchful tyranny would give them, they will yet 
contrive to leave there. They know that their buried words 
are seeds, and though they lie long in the earth, they will yet 
spring up with their ' richer and bolder meanings/ and publish 
on every breeze, their boldest mystery. 



THE BACONIAN RHETORIC. 65 

For let not men of narrower natures fancy that such action 
is not proper to the larger one, and cannot he historical. For 
there are different kinds of men, our science of men tells us, 
and that is an unscientific judgment which omits 'the particu- 
lar addition, that bounteous nature hath closed in each/ — her 
'addition to the bill that writes them all alike.' For there is 
a kind of men ' whose minds are proportioned to that which 
may be dispatched at once, or within a short return of time, 
and there is another kind, whose minds are proportioned to 
that which begins afar off, and is to be won with length of 
pursuit,' — so the Coryphaeus of those choir that the latter 
kind compose, informs us, 'so that there may be fitly said to 
be a longanimity, which is commonly also ascribed to God as a 
magnanimity.-' 

And our English philosophers had to light what this one calls 
anew ' Lamp of Tradition/ before they could make sure of trans- 
mitting their new science, through such mediums as those that 
their time gave them; and a very gorgeous many-branched 
lamp it is, that the great English philosopher brings out from 
that 'secret school of living Learning and living Art' to which he 
secretly belongs, for the admiration of the professionally learned 
of his time, and a very lustrous one too, as it will yet prove to 
be, when once it enters the scholar's apprehension that it was 
ever meant be lighted, when once the little movement that 
turns on the dazzling jet is ordered. 

For we have all been so taken up with the Baconian Logic 
hitherto and its wonderful effects in the relief of the human 
estate, that the Baconian Rhetoric has all this time es- 
caped our notice; and nobody appears to have suspected that 
there was anything in that worth looking at; any more than 
they suspect that there is anything in some of those other 
divisions which the philosopher himself lays so much stress on 
in his proposal for the Advancement of Learning, — in his pro- 
posal for the advancement of it into all the fields of human 
activity. But we read this proposition still, as James the 
First was expected to read it, and all these departments which 
are brought into that general view in such a dry and formal 

F 



66 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

and studiously scholastic manner, appear to be put there 
merely to fill up a space ; and because the general plan of this so 
erudite performance happened to include them. 

For inasmuch as the real scope and main bearing of this 
proposition, though it is in fact there, is of course not there, in 
any such form as to attract the particular attention of the 
monarch to whose eye the work is commended ; and inasmuch 
as the new art of a scientific Rhetoric is already put to its 
most masterly use in reserving that main design, for such as 
may find themselves able to receive it, of course, the need of 
any such invention is not apparent on the surface of the work, 
and the real significance of this new doctrine of Art and its 
radical relation to the new science, is also reserved for that 
class of readers who are able to adopt the rules of interpreta- 
tion which the work itself lays down. Because the real ap- 
plications of the New Logic could not yet be openly discussed, 
no one sees as yet, that there was, and had to be, a Rhetoric to 
match it. 

For this author, who was not any less shrewd than the one 
whose methods we have just been observing a little, had also 
early discovered in the great personages of his time, a dispo- 
sition to moderate his voice whenever he went to speak to 
them on matters of importance, in his natural key, for his 
voice too, was naturally loud, and high as he gives us to under- 
stand, though he 'could speak small like a woman'; he too had 
learned to take the tone from the ear of him to whom he spake, 
and he too had learned, that it was not enough merely to 
speak so as to make himself heard by those whom he wished 
to affect. He also. had learned to speak according to the affair 
he had in hand, according to the purpose which he wished to 
accomplish. He also is of the opinion that different kinds of 
audiences and different times, require different modes of speech, 
and though he found it necessary to compose his works in the 
style and language of his own time, he was confident that it 
was a language which would not remain in use for many ages; 
and he has therefore provided himself with another, more to 
his mind which he has taken pains to fold carefully within the 



THE BACONIAN RHETORIC. 67 

other, and one which he thinks will bear the wear and tear of 
those revolutions that he perceives to be imminent. 

But in consequence of our persistent oversight of this Art of 
Tradition, on which he relies so much, (which is as fine an in- 
vention of his, as any other of his inventions which we find 
ourselves so much the better for), that appeal to ' the times that 
are farther off,' has not yet taken effect, and the audience for 
whom he chiefly laboured is still ' deferred.' 

This so noble and benio-n art which he calls, with his own 
natural modesty and simplicity, the Art of Tradition, this art 
which grows so truly noble and worthy, so distinctively human, 
in his clear, scientific treatment of it, — in his scientific clearance 
of it from the wildnesses and spontaneities of accident, or the 
superfluities and trickery of an art without science,— that stops 
short of the ultimate, the human principle, — this so noble art 
of speech or tradition is, indeed, an art which this great teacher 
and leader of men will think it no scorn to labour: it is one on 
which, even such a teacher, can find time to stop; it is one 
which even such a teacher can stop to build from the founda- 
tion upwards, he will not care how splendidly ; it is one on 
which he will spend without stint, and think it gain to spend, 
the wealth of his invention. 

But, at the same time, it is with him a subordinate art. It 
has no worth or substance in itself; it borrows all its worth 
from that which masters and rigorously subdues it to its end. 
Here, too, we find ourselves coming down on all its old cere- 
monial and observance, from that new height which we found 
our foreign philosopher in such quiet possession of, — taking 
his way at a puff through poor Cicero's periods, — those periods 
which the old orator had taken so much pains with, and laugh- 
ing at his pains: — but this English philosopher is more daring 
still, for it is he who disposes, at a word, without any comment, 
just in passing merely, — from his practical stand-point, — of 
' the flutes and trumpets of the Greeks,' like the other making 
nothing at all in his theory of criticism of mere elegance, 
though it is the Gascon, it is true, who undertakes the more 
lively and extreme practical demonstrations of this theoretical 

f2 



A 



68 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 



contempt of it, — setting it at nought, and Hying in the face of 
it, — writing in as loquacious and homely a style as he possibly 
can, just for the purpose for setting it at nought, though not 
without giving us a glimpse occasionally, of a faculty that would 
enable him to mince the matter as fine as another if he should 
see occasion — as, perhaps, he may. For he talks very emphati- 
cally about his poetnj here and there, and seems to intimate that 
he has a gift that way ; and that he has, moreover, some works 
of value in that department of letters, which he is anxious to 
' save up ' for posterity, if he can. But here, it is the scholar, 
and not the loquacious old gentleman at all, who is giving us 
in his choicest, selectest, courtliest phrase, in his most stately 
and condensed style, his views of this subject; but that which is 
noticeable is, that the art in its fresh, new upspringing from the 
secret of life and nature, from the soul of things, the art and 
that which it springs from, is in these two so different forms 
identical. Here, too, the point of its criticism and review is 
the same. ' Away with that eloquence that so enchants us with 
its harmony that we should more study it than things' ; but here 
the old Eoman masters the philosopher, for a moment, and he 
puts in a scholarly parenthesis, ' unless you will affirm that of 
Cicero to be of so supreme perfection as to form a body of itself' 
But Hamlet, in his discourse with that wise reasoner, and 
unfortunate practitioner, who thought that brevity was the soul 
of wit, and tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, puts 
it more briefly still. 

Polonius. What do you read, my lord ? 
Hamlet. Words, words, words ! 

' More matter, and less art,' another says in that same treatise 
on art and speculation. Now inasmuch as this art and science 
derives all its distinction and lustre from that new light on the 
human estate of which it was to be the vehicle, somebody must 
find the trick of it, so as to be able to bring out that doctrine 
by its help, before we can be prepared to understand the real 
worth of this invention. It would be premature to undertake 
to set it forth fully, till that is accomplished. There must be 
a more elaborate exhibition of that science, before the art of 



THE BACONIAN RHETORIC. 69 

its transmission can be fully treated ; we cannot estimate it, till 
we see how it strikes to the root of the new doctrine, how it 
begins with its beginning, and reaches to its end: we cannot 
estimate it till we see its relation, its essential relation, to that 
new doctrine of the human nature, and that new doctrine of 
state, which spring from the doctrine of nature in general, 
which is the doctrine, which is the beginning and the end of 
the new science. 

We find here on the surface, as we find everywhere in this 
comprehensive treatise, much apparent parade of division and 
subdivision, and the author appears to lay much stress upon 
this, and seems disposed to pride himself upon his dexterity in 
chopping up the subject as finely as possible, and keeping the 
parts quite clear of one another ; and sometimes, in his distribu- 
tions, putting those points the farthest apart which are the most 
nearly related, though not so far, that they cannot ' look to- 
wards each other,' though it may be, as the other says, ' ob- 
liquely.' He evidently depends very much on his arrangement, 
and seems, indeed, to be chiefly concerned about that, when he 
comes to the more critical parts of his subject. But it is to 
the continuities which underlie these separations, to which he 
directs the attention of those to whom he speaks in earnest, 
and not in particular cases only. e Generally ,' he says, ' let this 
be a rule, that all partitions of knowledges be accepted rather 
for lines and veins, than for sections and separations, and 
that the continuance and entireness of knowledge be preserved. 
For the contrary hereof,' he says, ' is that which has made par- 
ticular sciences barren, shallow, and ERRONEOUS, 
while they have not been nourished and maintained from the 
common fountain.' For this is the ONE SCIENCE, the deep, 
the true, the fruitful one, the fruitful because the ONE.' 

These lines, then, which he cautions us against regarding as 
divisions, which are brought in with such parade of scholasti- 
cism, with such a profound appearance of artifice, will always 
be found by those who have leisure to go below the surface, to 
be but the indications of those natural articulations and branches 
into which the subject divides and breaks itself, and the con- 



70 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

ducting lines to that trunk and heart of sciences, that common 
fountain from which all this new vitality, this sudden up-- 
springing and new blossoming of learning proceeds, that foun- 
tain in which its flowers, as well as its fruits, and its thick 
embosoming leaves are nourished. 

Here in this Art of Tradition, which comprehends the 
whole subject of the human speeeh from the new ground of 
the common nature in man — that double nature which tends to 
isolation on the one hand, and which makes him a part and a 
member of society on the other; we find it treated, first, as a 
means by which men come simply to a common understanding 
with each other, by which that common ground, that ground of 
community, and communication, and identity, which a common 
understanding in this kind makes, can be best reached; and 
next we find it treated as a means by which more than the 
understanding shall be reached, by which the sentiment, the 
common sentiment, which also belongs to the larger nature, 
shall be strengthened and developed, — by which the counter- 
acting and partial sentiments shall be put in their place, and 
the will compelled; whereby that common human form, which 
in its perfection is the object of the human love and reverence 
shall be scientifically developed ; by which the particular 
form with its diseases shall be artistically disciplined and 
treated. This Art of Tradition concerns, first, the understand- 
ing; and secondly, the affections and the will. As man is 
constituted, it is not enough to convince his understanding. 

First, then, it is 'the organ' and 'method' of tradition; and 
next, it is what he calls the illustration of it. First, the object 
is, to bring truth to the understanding in as clear and un- 
obstructed a manner as the previous condition — as the diseases 
and pre-occupations of the mind addressed will admit of, and 
next to bring all the other helps and arts by which the senti- 
ments are touched and the will mastered. First, he will 
speak true, or as true as they will let him; but it is not 
enough to speak true. He must be able to speak sharply too, 
perhaps — or humorously, or touchingly, or melodiously, or 
overwhelmingly, with words that burn. It is not enough, 



THE BACONIAN RHETORIC. 7 1 

perhaps, to reach the ear of his auditor : ' peradventure' he too 
'will also pierce it.' It is not enough to draw diagrams in 
chalk on a black board in this kind of mathematics, where the 
will and the affections are the pupils, and standing ready to 
defy axioms, prepared at any moment to demonstrate prac- 
tically, that the part is greater than the whole, and face down 
the universe with it. ' murdering impossibility to make what 
cannot be, slight work.' It is not enough to have a tradition 
that is clear, or as clear a one as will pass muster with the 
government and with the preconceptions of the people them- 
selves. He must have a pictured one — a pictorial, an illumi- 
nated one — a beautiful one, — he must have what he calls an 
Illustrated Tradition. 

' Why not,' he says. He runs his eye over the human in- 
strumentalities, and this art which we call art — par excellence, 
which he sees setting up for itself, or ministering to ignorance 
and error, and feeding the diseased affections with ■ the sweet 
that is their poison/ he seizes on at once, in behalf of his 
science, and declares that it is her lawful property, ' her slave, 
born in her house,' and fit for nothing in the world but to 
minister to her; and what is more, he suits the action to the 
word — he brings the truant home, and reforms her, and sets 
her about her proper business. That is what he proposes to 
have done in his theory of art, and it is what he tells us he 
has done himself; and he has: there is no mistake about it. 
That is what he means when he talks about his illustrated tra- 
dition of science — his illustrated tradition of the science of 
human nature and its differences, original and acquired, and 
the diseases to which it is liable, and the artificial growths 
which appertain to it. It is very curious, that no one has 
seen this tradition — this illustrated tradition, or anything else, 
indeed, that was at all worthy of this new interpreter of mys- 
teries, who goes about to this day as the inventor of a method 
which he was not able himself to put to any practical use; an 
inventor who was obliged to leave his machine for men of a more 
quick and subtle genius, or to men of a more practical turn of 
mind to manage, men who had a closer acquaintance with nature. 



72 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

That which is first to be noted in looking carefully at this 
draught of a new Art of Tradition which the plan of the Ad- 
vancement of Learning includes, — that which the careful reader 
cannot fail to note, is the fact, that throughout all this most 
complete and radical exhibition of the subject (for brief and 
casual as that exhibition seems on the surface, the science and 
art from its root to its outermost branches, is there) — through- 
out all this exhibition, under all the superficial divisions and 
subdivisions of the subject, it is still the method of Progres- 
sion which is set forth here: under all these divisions, there is 
still one point made ; it is still the Art of a Tradition which is 
designed to reserve the secrets of science, and the nobler arts 
of it, for the minds and ages that are able to receive them. 
This new art of tradition, with its new organs and methods, 
and its living and beautiful illustration, when once we look 
through the network of it to the unity within, this new rhetoric 
of science, is in fact the instrument which the philosopher 
would substitute, if he could, for those more cruel weapons 
which the men of his time were ready to take in hand; and it 
is the instrument with which he would forestall those yet more 
fearful political^ convulsions that already seemed to his eye to 
threaten from afar the social structures of Christendom ; it is the 
beautiful and bloodless instrumentality whereby the mind of 
the world is to be wrenched insensibly from its old place 
without ' breaking all. ' 

For neither does this author, any more than that other, who 
has been quoted here on this point, think it wise for the phi- 
losopher to rush madly out of his study with his Eureka, 
and bawl to the first passer by in scientific terms the last result 
of his science, ' lording it over his ignorance' with what can 
be to him only a magisterial announcement. For what else 
but that can it be, for instance, to tell the poor peasant, on 
his way to market, with his butter and eggs in his basket, 
planting his feet on the firm earth without any qualms or mis- 
givings, and measuring his day by the sun's great toil and re- 
joicing race in heaven, what but this same magisterial teaching 
is it, to stop him, and tell him to his bewildered face that the 



THE BACONIAN RHETORIC. 73 

sun never rises or sets, and that the earth is but a revolving 
ball? Instead of giving him a truth you have given him a 
falsehood. You have brought him a truth out of a sphere 
with which he is not conversant, which he cannot ascend to — 
whose truths he cannot translate into his own, without jarring 
all. Either you have told him what must be to him a lie, 
or you have upset all his little world of beliefs with your 
magisterial doctrine, and confounded and troubled him to no 
purpose. 

But the Method of Progression, as set forth by Lord Bacon, 
requires that the new scientific truth shall be, not nakedly 
and flatly, but artistically exhibited; because, as he tells us, 
'the great labour is with the people, and this people who 
knoweth not the law are cursed/ He will not have it ex- 
hibited in bare propositions, but translated into the people's 
dialect. He would not begin if he could — if there were no 
political or social restriction to forbid it — by overthrowing 
on all points the popular belief, or wherever it differs from 
the scientific conclusion. It is a very different kind of philo- 
sophy that proceeds in that manner. This is one which com- 
prehends and respects all actualities. The popular belief, even 
to its least absurdity f is something more than nothing in 
nature'; and the popular belief with all its admixture of 
error, is better than the half-truths of a misunderstood, un- 
translated science; better than these would be in its place. 
That truth of nature which it contains for those who are able 
to receive it, and live by it, you would destroy for them, if 
you should attempt to make them read it prematurely, in your 
language. Any kind of organism which by means of those 
adjustments and compensations, with which nature is always 
ready to help out anything really hers, — any organism that 
is capable of serving as the means of an historical social con- 
tinuance, is already some gain on chaos and social dissolution ; 
and is, perhaps, better than a series of philosophical experi- 
ments. The difficulty is not to overthrow the popular errors, 
but to get something better in their place, he tells us; and 
that there are men who have succeeded in the first attempt, and 



74 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

very signally failed in the second. Beautiful and vigorous 
unions grew up under the classic mythologies, that dissolved 
and went down for ever, in the sunshine of the classic phi- 
losophies. For there were more things in heaven and 
earth than were included in those last, or dreampt of in 
them. 

In your expurgation, of the popular errors, you must be 
sure that the truth they contain, is in some form as strongly, 
as effectively composed in your text, or the popular error is 
truer and better than the truth with which you would replace 
it. This is a master who will have no other kind of teaching 
in his school. His scholars must go so far in their learning as 
to be able to come back to this popular belief, and account for 
it and understand it; they must be as wise as the peasant 
again, and be able to start with him, from his starting point, 
before they can get any diploma in this School of Advancement, 
or leave to practise in it. But when the old is already 
ruinous and decaying, and oppressing and keeping back the 
new, — when the vitality is gone out of it, and it has become 
deadly instead, when the new is struggling for new forms, 
the man of science though never so conservative from incli- 
nation and principle, will not be wanting to himself and to 
the state in this emergency. He ' loves the fundamental part 
of state more ' than in such a crisis he will ' doubt the change 
of it/ and will not ' fear to jump a body with a dangerous 
physic, that's sure of death without it.' 

First of all then, the condition of this lamp of tradition, 
that is to burn on for ages, is, that it shall be able to adapt 
itself to the successive stages of the advancement it lights. 
It is the inevitable condition of this school which begins 
with the present, which begins with the people, which de- 
scends to the lowest stage of the cotemporary popular belief, 
and takes in the many-headed monster himself, without any 
trimming at all, for its audience, — it is the first condition of 
such a school, conducted by a man of science, that it shall 
have its proper grades of courts and platforms, its selecter 
and selectest audiences. There must be landing places in the 



THE BACONIAN RHETORIC. 75 

ascent, points of rendezvous agreed on, where ' the delicate 
collateral sounds' are heard, which only those who ascend can 
hear. There is no jar, — there is no forced advancement in 
this school; there is no upward step for any, who have not 
first been taught to see it, who have not, indeed, already taken 
it. For it is an artist's school, and not a pedant's, or a vague 
speculator's, who knows not how to converge his speculation, 
even upon his mode of tradition. 

The founders of this school trust much in their general plan of 
instruction and relief ', to the gradual advancement of a common 
intelligence, by means of a scientific, but concealed historical 
teaching. They will teach their lower classes, their ' beginners,' 
as great nature teaches — insensibly; — as great nature teaches 
— in the concrete, ' in easy instances.' For the secret of her 
method is that which they have studied; that is the learning 
which they have mastered; the spirit of it, which is the poet's 
gift, the quickest, subtlest, most searching, most analytic, most 
synthetic spirit of it, is that with which great nature has 
endowed them. They will speak, as they tell us, as the masters 
always have spoken from of old to them who are without ; they 
will ' open their mouths in parables,' they will ' utter their dark 
sayings on the harp. They know that men are already prepared 
by nature's own instruction, to feel in a fact, — to receive in 
historical representations — truths which would startle them in 
the abstract, truths which they are not yet prepared to dis- 
engage from the historical combinations in which they receive 
them; though with every repetition, and especially with the 
pointed, selected, prolonged repetition of the teacher, where 
the ' illustrious instance ' is selected and cleared of its 
extraneous incident, and made to enter the mind alone, and 
pierce it with its principle, — with every such repetition, the 
step to that generalization and axiom becomes insensibly 
shorter and more easy. They know that men are already wiser 
than their teachers, in some — in many things; that they 
have all of them a great stock of incommunicative wisdom 
which all their teachers have not been able to make them give 
up, which they never will give up, till the strong man, who 



76 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

is stronger, enters with his larger learning out of the same 
book, with his mightier weapons out of the same armory, 
and spoils their goods, or makes them old and worthless, by 
the side of the new, resplendent, magic wealth he brings 
with him. 

The new philosophy of nature has truths to teach which 
nature herself has already been teaching all men, with more 
or less effect, miscellaneously, and at odd hours, ever since 
they were born ; and this philosopher gives a large place in his 
history, to that vulgar, practical human wisdom, whieh all the 
books till his time had been of too hisdi a strain to glance at. 
But 'art is a second nature, and imitateth that dextrously and 
compendiously, which nature performs by ambages and length 
of time.' The scientific interpreter of nature will select, and unite, 
and teach continuously, and pointedly, in grand, ideal, repre- 
sentative fact, in 'prerogative instances/ that which nature has 
but faintly and unconsciously impressed with her method; 
for he has a scientific organum, and what is more, — a great 
deal more, a thousand times more, — he has the scientific genius 
that invented it. His soul is a Novum Organum — his mind is 
a table of rejections that sifts the historic masses, and brings 
out the instances that are to his purpose, the bright, bold in- 
stances that flame forth the doubtful truth, that tell their own 
story and need no interpreter, the high ideal instances that 
talk in verse because it is their native tongue and they can no 
other. He has found, — or rather nature lent it to him, 
the universal historic solvent, and the dull, formless, miscel- 
laneous facts of the common human experience, spring up in 
magic orders, in beautiful, transparent, scientific continuities, 
as they arrange themselves by the laws of his thinking. 

For the truth is, and it must be said here, and not here 
only, but everywhere, wherever there is a chance to say it, — 
that Novum Organum was not made to examine the legs of 
spiders with, or the toes of 'the grandfather-long-legs/ or any 
of their kindred; though of course it is susceptible of such an 
application, when it falls into the hands of persons whose 
genius inclines them in those directions; and it is a use, that 



THE BACONIAN RHETORIC. 77 

the inventor would not have disdained to put it to himself, if 
he had had time, and if his attention had not been so much 
distracted by the habits and history of that 'nobler kind of 
vermin/ which he found feeding on the human weal in his 
time, and eating out the heart of it. This man was not a fool, 
but a man. He was a naturalist indeed, of the newest and 
highest style, but that did not hinder his being a man at the 
same time. He and his company were the first that set the 
example of going, deliberately, and on principle, out of the 
human nature for knowledge; but it was that they might re- 
return with better axioms for the culture, and nobility, and 
sway of that form, which, 'though it be but a part in the con- 
tinent of nature/ is as this one openly declares, ' the end and 
term of ' natural PHILOSOPHY,' in the intention of MAN." 
His science included the humblest and least agreeable of na- 
ture's performances; his Novum Organum was able to take 
up the smallest conceivable atom of existence, whether animate 
or not, and make a study of it. He has no disrespect for 
caterpillars or any kind of worm or insect; but he is not a 
caterpillar himself, or an insect of any kind, or a Saurian, or 
an Icthyosaurian, but a man ; and it was for the sake of building 
up from a new basis a practical doctrine of human life, that 
he invented that instrument, and put so much fine work 
upon it. 

With his ' prerogative instances,' he will build height 
after height, the solid, but imperceptible stair-way to his summit 
of knowledges, so that men shall tread its utmost floors without 
knowing what heights they are — even as they tread great 
nature's own solidities, without inquiring her secret. 

The shrewd unlearned man of practice shall take that 
great book of nature, that illustrated digest of it, on his knees, 
to while away his idle hours with, in rich pastime, and smile 
to see there, all written out, that which he faintly knew, and 
never knew that he knew before; he will find there in sharp 
points, in accumulations, and percussions, that which his own 
experience has at length wearily, dimly, worked and worn into 
him. It is his own experience, exalted indeed, and glorified, 



78 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

but it is that which beckons him on to that which is yet be- 
yond it; he shall read on, and smile, and laugh, and weep, 
and wonder at the power; but never dream that it is science, 
the new science — the science of nature — the product of the 
new organum of it applied to human nature, and human 
life. The abstract statement of that which the concrete 
exhibition veils, is indeed always there, though it lie never 
so close, in never so snug a corner; but it is there so artisti- 
cally environed, that the reader who is not ready for it, who 
has not learned to disengage the principle from the instance, 
who has had no hint of an illustrated tradition in it, will never 
see it ; or if he sees it, he will think it is there by accident, or 
inspiration, and pass on. 

Here, in this open treatise upon the art of delivering and 
teaching of knowledge, the author lays down, in the most 
impressive terms, the necessity of a style which shall serve as 
a veil of tradition, imperceptible or impenetrable to the un- 
initiated, and admitting ' only such as have by the help of a 
master, attained to the interpretation of dark sayings, or are 
able by their own genius to enter within the veil'; and after 
having distributed under many heads, the seci'et of this 
method of scientific communication, he asserts distinctly that 
there is no other mode of dealing with the popular belief and 
preconception, but the one just described — that same method 
which the teachers of the people have always instinctively 
adopted, whenever that which was new and contrary to the 
received doctrines, was to be communicated. f For a man of 
judgment,' he says, 'must, of course, perceive, that there 
should be a difference in the teaching and delivery of know- 
ledge, according to the presuppositions, which he finds infused 
and impressed upon the mind of the learner. For that which is 
new and foreign from opinions received, is to be delivered in 
another FORM, from that which is agreeable and familiar. 
And, therefore, Aristotle, when he says to Democritus, ' if we 
shall indeed dispute and not follow after similitudes' as if he 
would tax Democritus with being too full of comparisons, 
where he thought to reprove, really commended him/ There 



THE BACONIAN RHETORIC. 79 

is no use in disputing in such a case, he thinks. ' For those 
whose doctrines are already seated in popular opinion, have 
only to dispute or prove; but those whose doctrines are beyond 
the popular opinions, have a double labour ; the one to make 
themselves conceived, and the other to prove and demonstrate; 
so that it is of necessity with them to have recourse to similitudes 
and TRANSLATIONS to express themselves. And, therefore, in 
the infancy of learning, and in rude times, when those concep- 
tions which are now trivial, were then new, the ivorld ivas full 
of parables and similitudes, for else would men either have 
passed over without mark, or else rejected eor paradoxes, 
that which was offered before they had understood or judged. 
So in divine learning, we see how frequent parables and 
tropes are, for it is a rule in the doctrine of delivery, that every 
science which is not consonant with presuppositions and preju- 
dices, must pray in aid of similes and allusions? 

The true master of the art of teaching will vary his method 
too, he tells us according to the subject which he handles, — 
and the reader should note particularly the illustration of this 
position, the instance of this general necessity, which the 
author selects for the sake of pointing his meaning here, for 
it is here — precisely here — that we begin to touch the heart 
of that new method which the new science itself prescribed, — 
' the true teacher will vary his method according to the sub- 
ject which he handles,' for there is a great difference in the 
delivery of mathematics, which are the most abstracted of 
sciences, and policy, which is the most immersed, and the 
opinion that ' uniformity of method, in multiformity of matter, 
is necessary, has proved very hurtful to learning, for it tends 
to reduce learning to certain empty and barren — note it, — 
barren — e generalities;' — (so important is the method as that ; 
that it makes the difference between the fruitful and the barren, 
between the old and the new) ' being but the very husks and 
shells of sciences, all the kernel being forced out and expressed 
with the torture and press of the method ; and, therefore, - as I 
did allow well of particular topics for invention' — therefore — 
his science requires him to go into particulars, and as the neces- 



80 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

sary consequence of that, it requires freedom — 'therefore^ — as I 
did allow well of particular topics of invention, 'so do I allow 
likewise of particular methods of tradition.' Elsewhere, — in 
his Novum Organum — he quotes the scientific outlines and 
divisions of this very book, he quotes the very draught and 
outline of the new human science, which is the principal thing 
in it, and tells us plainly that he is perfectly aware that those 
new divisions, those essential differences, those true and radical 
forms in nature, which he has introduced here, in his doctrine 
of human nature, will have no practical effect at all, as they 
are exhibited here ; because they are exhibited in this method 
which he is here criticising, that is, in empty and barren ab- 
stractions, — because it was impossible for him to produce here 
anything but the husks and shells of that principal science, all 
the kernel being forced out and expulsed with the torture and 
press of the method. But, at the same time, he gives us to 
understand, that these same shells and husks may be found in 
another place, with the kernels and nuts in them, and that he 
has not taken so much pains to let us see in so many places, 
what new forms of delivery the new philosophy will require, 
merely for the sake of letting us see, at the same time, that 
when it came to practice, he himself stood by the old ones, 
and contented himself with barren abstractions, and generali- 
ties, the husks and shells of sciences, instead of aiming at 
particulars, and availing himself of these 'particular methods of 
tradition' 

He takes also this occasion to recommend a method which 
was found extremely serviceable at that time; namely, the 
method of teaching by aphorism, 'without any show of an art 
or method ; not merely because it tries the author, since 
aphorisms being made out of the pith and. heart of sciences, no 
man can write them who is not sound and grounded,' who has not 
a system with its trunk and root, though he makes no show of 
it, but buries it and shows you here and there the points on 
the surface that are apt to look as if they had some underlying 
connection — not only because it tries the author, but because 
they point to action ; for particulars being dispersed, do best 



THE BACONIAN RHETORIC. 8 1 

agree with dispersed directions; and, moreover, aphorisms 
representing a BEOKEN knowledge, invite men to inquire 
farther, whereas methods, carrying the show of a total, do 
secure men as if they were at farthest, and it is the advance- 
ment of learning that he is proposing. 

He suggests again, distinctly here, the rule he so often 
claims he has himself put in practice, elsewhere, that the use 
of confutation in the delivery of science, ought to be very 
sparing; and to serve to remove strong preoccupations and 
prejudgments, and not to minister and excite disputations and 
doubts. For he says in another place, ' As Alexander Borgia 
was wont to say of the expedition of the French for Naples, 
that they came with chalk in their hands, to mark up their 
lodgings, and not with weapons to fight, so / like better that 
entry of truth which cometh peaceably, with chalk to mark 
up those minds, which are capable to lodge and harbour it, 
than that which cometh with pugnacity and contention.' 

He alludes here too, in passing, to some other distinctions 
of method, which are already received, that of analysis and 
synthesis, or CONSTITUTION, that of concealment, or CRYPTIC, 
which he says ' he allows well of, though he has himself stood 
upon those which are least handled and observed.' He brings 
out his doctrine of the necessity of a method which shall in- 
clude particulars for practical purposes also, under another 
head: here it is the limit of rules, — the propositions or precepts 
of arts that he speaks of, and the degree of particularity which 
these precepts ought to descend to. ' For every knowledge/ 
he says, ' may be fitly said to have a latitude and longitude, 
accounting the latitude towards other sciences' (for there are 
rules and propositions of such latitude as to include all arts, all 
sciences) — ' and the longitude towards action, that is, from 
the greatest generality, to the most particular precept : and as 
to the degree of particularity to which a knowledge should 
descend/ though something must, of course, be left in 
all departments to the discretion of the practitioner, he 
thinks it is a question which will bear looking into in a 
general way ; and that it might be possible to have rules in 

G 



82 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OP TRADITION. 

all departments, which would limit very much the necessity 
of individual experiment, and not leave us so much at the 
mercy of individual discretion in the most serious matters. 
Philosophy, as he finds it, does not appear to be very helpful 
to practice, on account of its keeping to those general propo- 
sitions, so much, as well as on some other accounts, and has 
fallen into bad repute, it seems, among men who find it ne- 
cessary to make, without science, as they best can, rules of 
some sort; — rules that are capable of dealing with that quality 
in particulars which is apt to be called obstinacy in this aspect 
of it. ' For we see remote and superficial generalities do but 
offer knowledge to scorn of practical men, and are no more 
aiding to practice, than an Ortelius's universal map is to direct 
the way between London and York.' .And what is this itself but 
a universal map, this map of the advancement of learning? 

All this doctrine of the tradition of sciences, he produces 
under the head of the method of their tradition, but in speak- 
ing of the organ of it, he treats it exclusively as the medium 
of tradition for those sciences which require concealment, or 
admit only of a suggestive exhibition. And as he makes, too, 
the claim that he has himself given practical proof, in passing, 
of his proficiency in this art, and appeals to the skilful for the 
truth of this statement,' the passage, at least, in which this 
assertion is made, will be likely to repay the inquiry which 
it invites. 

He begins by drawing our attention to the fact, that words 
are not the only representatives of things, and he says * this is 
not an inconsiderable thing, for while we are treating of the 
coin of intellectual matters, it is pertinent to observe, that as 
money may be made of other materials besides gold and silver, 
so other marks of things may be invented besides words and 
letters. And by way of illustrating the advantages of such a 
means of tradition, under certain disadvantages of position, 
he adduces as much in point, the case of Periander, who being 
consulted how to preserve a tyranny neioly usurped, bid the 
messenger attend and report what he saw him do, and went into 
his garden and topped all the highest flowers ; signifying that 



THE BACONIAN RHETOKIC. 83 

it consisted in the cutting off and keeping low of the nobility 
and grandees.' And thus other apparently trivial, purely 
purposeless and sportive actions, might have a traditionary 
character of no small consequence, if the messenger were 
only given to understand beforehand, that the acts thus per- 
formed were axiomatical, pointing to rules of practice, that 
the forms were representative forms, whose ' real' exhibition 
of the particular natures in question, was much more vivid 
and effective, much more memorable as well as safe, than any 
abstract statement of that philosophic truth, which is the 
truth of direction, could be. 

As to the c accidents of words, which are measure, sound, and 
elevation of accent, and the sweetness and harshness of them/ 
even here the new science suggests a new rule, which is not 
without a remarkable relation to that 'particular method of tra- 
dition? which the author tells us in another place, some parts 
of his new science required. ' This subject/ he says, ' in- 
volves some curious observations in rhetoric, but chiefly 
poesy, as we consider it in respect of the verse, and not of 
the argument ; wherein, though men in learned tongues do tie 
themselves to the ancient measures, yet in modern languages it 
seemeth to me as free to make new measures of vej'ses as of 
dances.^ The spirit of the new philosophy had a chance to 
speak out there for once, without intending, of course, to 
transcend that particular limit just laid down, namely, the mea- 
sure of verses, and with that literal limitation, to the form 
of the verse, the remark is sufficiently suggestive; for he 
brings out from it at the next step, in the way of formula, 
the new principle, the new Shaksperian principle of rhetoric : 
' In these things the sense is better judge than the art. And of 
the servile expressing antiquity in an unlike and an unfit 
subject, it is well said : — ' Quod tempore antiquum videtur, id 
incongruitate est maxime novum.' ' 

But when he comes to speak specifically of writing as a 
means of tradition, he confines his remarks to that particular 
kind of writing, which is agreed on betwixt particular per- 
sons, and called by the name of cipher, giving excellent 

g2 



84 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

reasons for this proceeding, impertinent as it may seem, to 
those who think that his only object is to make out a list 
and 'muster-roll of the arts and sciences'; — stopping to tell us 
plainly that he knows what he is about, and that he has not 
brought in c these private and retired arts/ with so much 
stress, and under so many heads, in connection with ' the 
principal and supreme sciences,' and the mode of their tradition, 
without having some occasion for it. 

' Ciphers are commonly in letters, or alphabets, but may be 
in words/ he says, proceeding to enumerate the different 
kinds, and furnishing on the spot, some pretty specimens of 
what may be done in the way of that kind which he calls ' dou- 
bles/ a kind which he is particularly fond of; one hears again 
the echo of those delicate, collateral sounds, which our friend, 
over the mountains, warned us of, declining to say any more 
about them in that place. In the later edition, he takes occa- 
sion to say, in this connection, ' that as writing in the received 
manner no way obstructs the manner of pronunciation, but 
leaves that free, an innovation in it is of no purpose.' And if 
a cipher be the proper name for a private method of writing, 
agreed on betwixt particular persons, it is certainly the name 
for the method which he proposes to adopt in his tradition of 
the principal sciences; as he takes occasion to inform those 
whom it may concern, in an early portion of the work, and 
when he is occupied in the critical task of putting down some of 
the primary terms. ' I doubt not/ he says, by way of expla- 
nation, ' but it will easily appear to men of judgment, that in 
this and other particulars, wheresoever my conception and notion 
may differ from the ancient, I am studious to keep the ancient 
terms. 1 Surely there is no want of frankness here, so far as the 
men of judgment are concerned at least. And after condemn- 
ing those innovators who have taken a different course, he 
says again, ' But tome on the other side that do desire as 
much as lieth in my pen, to ground a sociable intercourse 
between antiquity and proficience, it seemeth best to keep way 
with antiquity usque ad aras; and therefore to retain the ancient 
terms, though I sometimes alter the uses and definitions, 
according to the moderate proceeding in civil government, 



THE BACONIAN RHETORIC. 85 

where, although there be some alteration, yet that holdeth which 
Tacitus wisely noteth ' eadem magistvatuum vocabula.' Surely 
that is plain enough, especially if one has time to take into 
account the force and historic reach of that last illustration, 
■ eadem magistratuum vocabula.' 

In the later and enlarged edition of his work, he lays much 
stress upon the point that the cipher ' should be free from sus- 
picion,' for he says, ' if a letter should come into the hands of 
such as have a power over the writer or receiver, though the 
cipher itself be trusty and impossible to decipher, it is still sub- 
ject to examination and question, and (as he says himself), ' to 
avoid all suspicion? he introduces there a cipher in letters, which 
he invented in his youth in Paris, ' having the highest perfec- 
tion of a cipher, that of signifying omnia per omnia- and for 
the same reason perhaps, that of ' avoiding all suspicion,' he 
quite omits there that very remarkable passage in the earlier 
work, in which he treats it as a medium of tradition, and takes 
pains to intimate his reasons for producing it in that connection, 
with the principal and supreme sciences. If it was, indeed, any 
object with him to avoid suspicion, and recent disclosures had 
then, perhaps, tended to sharpen somewhat the contemporary 
criticism; he did well, unquestionably, to omit that passage. 
But at the time when that was written, he appears to be chiefly 
inclined to notice the remarkable facilities, which this style 
offers to an inventive genius. For he says, ' in regard of the 
rawness and unskilfulness of the hands through which they pass, 
the greatest matters, are sometimes carried in the weakest 
ciphers.' And that there may be no difficulty or mistake as to 
the reading of that passage, he immediately adds, f In the 
enumeration of these private and retired arts, it may be 
thought I seek to make a great muster-roll of sciences, naming 
them for show and ostentation, and to little other purpose. 
But'— note it — 'But, let those which are skilful in them judge, 
whether I bring them in only for appearance, or whether, in that 
which I speak of them, though in few words, there be not 
some seed of proficience. And this must be remembered, that 
as there be many of great account in their countries and 



86 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

provinces, which, when they come up to the seat of the estate, 
are but of mean rank, and scarcely regarded ; so these arts, 
( f these private and retired arts,') being here placed with the 
principal and supreme sciences, seem petty things, YET TO SUCH 
AS HAVE CHOSEN THEM TO SPEND THEIR LABOURS 
AND STUDIES IN THEM, THEY SEEM GREAT MATTERS. 

(' Let those which are skilful in them, judge (after that) 
whether I bring them in only for appearance ' or to little other 
purpose'). 

That apology would seem sufficient, but we must know 
what these labours and studies are, before we can perceive the 
depth of it. And if we have the patience to follow him but 
a step or two further, we shall find ourselves in the way of 
some very direct and accurate information, as to that. For 
we are coming now, in the order of the work we quote from, 
to that very part, which contains the point of all these labours 
and studies, the end of them, — that part to which the science 
of nature in general, and the secret of this art of tradition, 
was a necessary introduction* 

Thus far, this art has been treated as a means of simply 
transferring knowledge, in such forms as the conditions of the 
Advancement of Learning prescribe, — forms adapted to the 
different stages of mental advancement, commencing with the 
lowest range of the common* opinion in his time, — starting 
with the contemporary opinions of the majority, and reserving 
* the secrets of knowledges,' for such as are able to receive 
them. Thus far, it is the Method, and the Organ of the 
tradition of which he has spoken. But it is when he comes 
to speak of what he calls the Illustration of it, that the 
convergency of his design begins to be laid open to us, for 
this work is not what it may seem on the surface, as he takes 
pains to intimate to us — a ' mere muster-roll of sciences.' 

It is when he comes to tell us that he will have his ' truth 



* For this Art of Tradition makes the link between the new 
Logic and the application of it to Human Nature and Human 
Life. 



THE BACONIAN RHETORIC. Sj 

in beauty dyed/ that lie does not propose to have the new 
learning left in the form of argument and logic, or in the form 
of bare scientific fact, that he does not mean to appeal with it 
to the reason only; that he will have it in a form in which it 
will be able to attract and allure men, and make them in love 
with it, a form in which it' will be able to force its way into the 
will and the affections, and make a lodgement in the hearts of 
men, long ere it is able to reach, the judgment; — it is not till 
he begins to bring out here, his new doctrine of the true end 
of rhetoric, and the use to which it ought to be put in sub- 
ordination to science, that we begin to perceive the significance 
of the arrangement which brings this theory of an Illustrated 
Art of Tradition into immediate connection with the new 
science of human nature and human life which the Author is 
about to constitute, — so as to serve as an introduction to it — the 
arrangement which interposes this art of Tradition, between 
the New Logic and its application to Human Nature and 
Human Life — to POLICY and MORALITY. 

He will not consent to have this so powerful engine of 
popular influence, which the aesthetic art seems, to his eye, to 
offer, left out, in his scheme of scientific instrumentalities: he 
will not pass it by scornfully, as some other philosophers have 
done, treating it merely as a voluptuary art. He will have 
of it, something which shall differ, not in degree only, but in 
kind, from the art of the confectioner. 

He begins by stating frankly his reasons for making so much 
of it in this grave treatise, which is what it professes to be, 
a treatise on Learning and its Advancement. f For although,' he 
says, f in true value, it is inferior to wisdom, as it is said by 
God to Moses, when he disabled himself for want of this 
faculty, - Aaron shall be thy speaker, and thou shalt be to him 
as God;' yet with people it is the more mighty, and it is just 
that which is mighty with the people — which he tells us in 
another place — is wanting. ' For this people who knoweth 
not the law are cursed.' ' But here he continues, ( for so Solomon 
saith, - Sapiens corde appellabitur prudens, sed dulcis eloquio 
majora reperiet;' signifying that profoundness of wisdom will 



88 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

help a man to a name or admiration/ — (it is something more 
than that which he is proposing as his end) — ' hut that it is 
eloquence which prevails in active life; so that the very move- 
ment which brought philosophy down to earth, and put her 
upon reforming the practical life of men, was the movement 
which led her to assume, not instinctively, only, but by theory, 
and on principle, this new and beautiful apparel, this deep 
disguise of pleasure. She comes into the court with her case, 
and claims that this Art, which has been treated hitherto 
as if it had some independent rights and laws of its own, is 
properly a subordinate of hers; a chattel gone astray, and 
setting up for itself as an art voluptuary. 

Works on rhetorics are not wanting, the author reports. 
Antiquity has laboured much in this field. Notwithstanding, 
he says, there is something to be done here too, and the Eliza- 
bethan aesthetics must be begun also in the 'prima philosophia. 
' Notwithstanding,' he continues, ' to stir the earth a little 
about the roots of this science, as we have done of the rest; 
the duty and office of Rhetoric is to apply reason to imagination 
for the better moving of the will ; for we see reason is dis- 
turbed in the administration of the will by three means; by 
sophism, which pertains to logic; by imagination or impres- 
sion, which pertains to rhetoric; and by passion or affection, 
which pertains to morality.' ' So in this negotiation within 
ourselves, men are undermined by inconsequences, solicited and 
importuned by impressions and observations, and transported 
by passions. Neither is the nature of man so unfortunately 
built, as that these powers and arts should have force to disturb 
reason and not to establish and advance it. For the end of 
logic is to teach a form of logic to secure reason, not to entrap 
it. The end of morality is to procure the affections to obey 
reason, and not to invade it. The end of rhetoric is to fill the 
imagination to second reason, and not to oppress it. For these 
abuses of arts come in but ex obliquo for caution.' 

That is the real original English doctrine of Art : — that is 
the doctrine of the age of Elizabeth, at least, as it stands in 
that queen's English, and though it may be very far from 



THE BACONIAN EHETORIC. 89 

being orthodox at present, it is the doctrine which must deter- 
mine the rule of any successful interpretation of works of art 
composed on that theory. ' And, therefore/ he proceeds to 
say, ' it was great injustice in Plato, though springing out of a 
just hatred of the rhetoricians of his time, to esteem of rhetoric 
but as a voluptuary art, resembling it to cookery that did mar 
wholesome meats, and help unwholesome, by variety of sauces 
to the pleasure of the taste? ■ And therefore, as Plato said 
eloquently, ' That virtue, if she could be seen, would move 
great love and affection, so, seeing that she cannot be showed 
to the sense by corporal shape, the next degree is to show her 
to the imagination in lively representation : for to show her to 
reason only, in subtilty of argument, was a thing ever derided 
in — Chrysippus and many of the Stoics — who thought to thrust 
virtue upon men by sharp disputations and conclusions, which 
have no sympathy with the will of man? 

1 Again, if the affections in themselves were pliant and 
obedient to reason, it were true there should be no great use 
of persuasions and injunctions to the will, more than of naked 
propositions and proofs ; but in regard of the continual muti- 
nies and seditions of the affections, 

Video meliora proboque 
Deteriora sequor ; 

Eeason would become captive and servile, if eloquence of per- 
suasions did not practise and win the imagination from the 
affections part, and contract a confederacy between the reason 
and the imagination, against the affections ; for the affections 
themselves carry ever an appetite to good, as reason doth. The 
difference is' — mark it — ' the difference is, that the affection 
beholdeth merely the present ; reason beholdeth the future and 
sum of time. And therefore the present filling the imagination 
most, reason is commonly vanquished ; but after that force of 
eloquence and persuasion hath made things future and remote, 
appear as present, then, upon the revolt of the imagination reason 
prevaileth. 3 Not less important than that is this art in his 
scheme of learning. No wonder that the department of learning 



90 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

which he refers to the imagination should take that prime 
place in his grand division of it, and be preferred deliberately 
and on principle to the two others. 

' Logic differeth from Rhetoric chiefly in this, that logic 
handleth reason exact and in truth, and rhetoric handleth it 
as it is planted in popular opinions and manners. And there- 
fore Aristotle doth ivisely place rhetoric as between logic on 
the one side, and moral or civil knowledge on the other, (and 
when we come to put together the works of this author, we 
shall find that that and none other is the place it takes in his 
system, that that is just the bridge it makes in his plan of 
operations.) 'The proofs and demonstrations of logic are 
towards all men indifferent and the same : but the proofs and 
persuasions of rhetoric ought to differ according to the auditors. 

Orpheus in sylvis inter delphinas Arion. 

Which application, in perfection of idea, ought to extend so 
far, that if a man should speak of the same thing to several per- 
sons, he should speak to them all respectively, and several ivays ;' 
and there was a great folio written on this plan which came 
out in those days dedicated ' to the Great Variety of Readers. 
From the most able to him that can but spell '; (this is just the 
doctrine, too, which the Continental philosopher sets forth we 
see); — though this l politic part of eloquence in private speech,' 
he goes on to say here, ' it is easy for the greatest orators to 
iv ant ; whilst by observing their well graced forms of speech, they 
lose the volubility of application; and therefore it shall not 
be amiss to recommend this to better inquiry, not being curious 
whether we place it here, or in that part which concerneth 
policy? 

Certainly one would not be apt to infer from that decided 
preference which the author himself manifests here for those 
stately and well-graced forms of speech, judging merely from 
the style of this performance at least, one would not be in- 
clined to suspect that he himself had ever been concerned in 
any literary enterprises, or was like to be, in which that volu- 
bility of application which he appears to think desirable, was 



THE BACONIAN RHETORIC. 9 1 

successfully put in practice. But we must remember, that he 
was just the man who was capable of conceiving of a variety 
of styles adapted to different exigencies, if we would have the 
key to this style in particular. 

But we must look a little at these labours and studies them- 
selves, which required such elaborate and splendid arts of 
delivery, if we would fully satisfy ourselves, as to whether 
this author really had any purpose after all in bringing them 
in here beyond that of mere ostentation, and for the sake of 
completing his muster-roll of the sciences. Above, we see an 
intimation, that the divisions of the subject are, after all, not 
so ' curious' but that the inquiry might possibly be resumed 
again in other connections, and in the particular connection 
specified, namely, in that part which concerneth Policy. 

In that which follows, the new science of human nature 
and human life — which is the end and term of this trea- 
tise, we are told — is brought out under the two heads of 
Morality and Policy; and it is necessary to look into both 
these departments in order to find what application he was 
proposing to make of this art and science of Tradition and 
Delivery, and in order to see what place — what vital place 
it occupied in his system. 



92 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

9 



CHAPTER II. 

THE SCIENCE OF POLICY. 
'Policy is the most immersed.' — Advancement of Learning. 

"OEVERSING the philosophic order, we glance first into 
■"■ that new department of science which the author is here 
boldly undertaking to constitute under the above name, be- 
cause in this his own practical designs, and rules of proceeding, 
are more clearly laid open, and the place which is assigned in 
his system to that radical science, for which these arts of 
Delivery and Tradition are chiefly wanting, is distinctly 
pointed out. 

And, moreover, in this department of Policy itself, in mark- 
ing out one of the grand divisions of it, we find him particu- 
larly noticing, and openly insisting on, the form of delivery 
and inculcation which the new science must take here, that is, 
if it is going to be at all available as a science of practice. 

In this so-called plan for the advancement of learning, the 
author proceeds, as we all know, by noticing the deficiencies 
in human learning as he finds it; and everywhere it is that 
radical deficiency, which leaves human life and human 
conduct in the dark, while the philosophers are busied with 
their controversies and wordy speculations. And in that part 
of his inventory where he puts down as wanting a science of 
practice in those every-day affairs and incidents, in which the 
life of man is most conversant, embodying axioms of practice 
that shall save men the wretched mistakes and blunders of 
which the individual life is so largely made up; blunders 
which are inevitable, so long as men are left here, to na- 
tural human ignorance, to uncollected individual experience, 
or to the shrewdest empiricism; — in this so original and in- 
teresting part of the work, he takes pains to tell us at length, 



THE BACONIAN RHETORIC. 93 

that that which he has before put down under the head of 
• delivery' as a point of form and method, becomes here essen- 
tial as a point of substance also. It is not merely that he will 
have his axioms and precepts of direction digested from the 
facts, instead of being made out of the teacher's own brains, 
but he will have the facts themselves, in all their stub- 
bornness and opposition to the teacher's preconceptions, for 
the body of the discourse, and the precepts accommodated 
thereto, instead of having the precepts for the body of the 
discourse, and the facts brought in to wait upon them. That 
is the form of the practical doctrine. 

He regrets that this part of a true learning has not been 
collected hitherto into writing, to the great derogation of 
learning, and the professors of learning; for from this proceeds 
the popular opinion which has passed into an adage, that there 
is no great concurrence between wisdom and learning. The 
deficiency here is well nigh total he says : ' but for the wisdom 
of business, wherein man's life is most conversant, there be no 
books of it, except some few scattered advertisements, that 
have no proportion to the magnitude of the subject. For if 
books were written of this, as of the other, I doubt not but 
learned men with mean experience would far excel men of long 
experience ivithoict learning, and outshoot them with their own 
bow. Neither need it be thought that this knowledge is too 
variable to fall under precept,' he says; and he mentions the 
fact, that in old Kome, so renowned for practical ability, in 
its wisest and saddest times, there were professors of this learn- 
ing, that were known for GENERAL WISE MEN, who used to 
walk at certain hours in the place, and give advice to private 
citizens, who came to consult with them of the marriage of a 
daughter, for instance, or the employing of a son, or of an accu- 
sation, or of a purchase or bargain, and every other occasion 
incident to man's life. There is a pretty scheme laid out truly. 
Have we any general wise man, or ghost of one, who walks 
up and down at certain hours and gives advice on such topics ? 
However that may be, this philosopher does not despair of 
such a science. ' So,' he says, commenting on that Koman 
custom, ' there is a wisdom of council and advice, even in 



94 THE ELIZABETHAN AKT OF TRADITION. 

private cases, arising out of a universal insight into the affairs 
of the world, which is used indeed upon particular cases pro- 
pounded, but is gathered by general observation of cases of like 
nature. 1 And fortifying himself with the example of Solomon, 
after collecting a string of texts from the Sacred Proverbs, 
he adds, e though they are capable, of course, of a more divine 
interpretation, taking them as instructions for life, they might 
have received large discourse, if he would have broken them 
and illustrated them, by deducements and examples. Nor was 
this in use with the Hebrews only, but it is generally to be 
found in the wisdom of the more ancient times, that as men 
found out any observation that they thought was good for life, 
they would gather it, and express it in parable, or aphorism, or 
fable. 

But for fables, they were vicegerents and supplies, where 
examples failed. Now that the times abound with history, 

THE AIM IS BETTER WHEN THE MARK IS ALIVE. And, 

therefore, he recommends as the form of writing, ' which is of 
all others fittest for this variable argument, discourses upon 
histories and examples: for knowledge drawn freshly, and in 
our view, out of particulars, knoweth the way best to jjarticulars 
again; and it hath much greater life for practice, when the 
discourse attendeth upon the example, than when the example 
attendeth upon the discourse. For this is no point of order 
as it seemeth at first ' (indeed it is not, it is a point as sub- 
stantial as the difference between the old learning of the world 
and the new) — ' this is no point of order, but of substance. 
For when the example is the ground being set down in a his- 
tory at large, it is set down with all circumstances, which may 
sometimes control the discourse thereupon made, and sometimes 
supply it as a very pattern for action; whereas the examples 
which are alleged for the discoursed sake, are cited succinctly 
and without particularity, and carry a servile aspect towards the 
discourse which they are brought in to make good.' 

The question of method is here, as we see, incidentally in- 
troduced ; but it is to be noted, and it makes one of the rules 
for the interpretation of that particular kind of style which is 
under consideration, that in this casual and secondary intro- 



THE BACONIAN RHETORIC. 95 

duction of a subject, we often get shrewder hints of the 
author's real intention than we do in those parts of the work 
where it is openly and distinctly treated; at least, these scat- 
tered and apparently accidental hints, — these dispersed direc- 
tions, often contain the key for the ' second ' reading, which he 
openly bespeaks for the more open and elaborate discussion. 

And thus we are able to collect, from every part of this 
proposal for a practical and progressive human learning, based 
on the defects of the unpractical and stationary learning which 
the world has hitherto been contented with, the author's 
opinion as to the form of delivery and inculcation best adapted 
to effect the proposed object under the given conditions. This 
question of form runs naturally through the whole work, and 
comes out in specifications of a very particular and significant 
kind under some of its divisions, as we shall see. But every- 
where we find the point insisted on, which we have just seen 
so clearly brought out, in the department which was to contain 
the axioms of success in private life. Whatever the particular 
form may be, everywhere we come upon this general rule. 
Whatever the particular form may be, everywhere it is to be 
one in which the facts shall have the precedence, and the con- 
clusions shall follow; and not one in which the conclusions 
stand first, and the facts are brought in to make them good. 
And this very circumstance is enough of itself to show that 
the form of this new doctrine will be thus far new, as new 
as the doctrine itself; that the new learning will be found in 
some form very different, at least, from that which the philo- 
sophers and professed teachers were then making use of in their 
didactic discourses, in some form so much more lively than that, 
and so much less oracular, that it would, perhaps, appear at first, 
to those accustomed only to the other, not to be any kind of 
learning at all, but something very different from that. 

But this is not the only point in the general doctrine of 
delivery which we find produced again in its specific appli- 
cations. Through all the divisions of this discourse on Learn- 
ing, and not in that part of it only in which the Art of its 
Tradition is openly treated, we find that the prescribed form 
of it is one which will adapt it to the popular preconceptions; 



96 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

and that it must be a form which will make it not only uni- 
versally acceptable, but universally attractive; that it is not 
only a form which will throw open the gates of the new school 
to all comers, but one that will bring in mankind to its benches. 
Not under the head of Method only, or under the head of 
Delivery and Tradition, but in those parts of the work in 
which the substance of the new learning is treated, we find 
dispersed intimations and positive assertions, that the form of 
it is, at the same time, popular and enigmatical, — not openly 
philosophical, and not 'magisterial,' — but insensibly didactic; 
and that it is, in its principal and higher departments — in those 
departments on which this plan for the human relief concen- 
trates its forces — essentially poetical. That is what we 
find in the body of the work ; and the author repeats in detail 
what he has before made a point of telling us, in general, 
under this head of Delivery and Tradition of knowledge, that 
he sees no reason why that same instrument, which is so 
powerful for delusion and error, should not be restored to its 
true uses as an instrument of the human advancement, and a 
vehicle, though a veiled one — a beautiful and universally- 
welcome vehicle — for bringing in on this Globe Theatre the 
knowledges that men are most in need of. 

The doctrine which is to be conveyed in this so subtle and 
artistic manner is none other than the Doctrine of Human 
Nature and Human Life, or, as this author describes it 
here, the Scientific Doctrine of Morality and Policy. It 
is that new doctrine of human nature and human- life 
which the science of nature in general creates. It is the 
light which universal science, collected from the continent of 
nature, gives to that insular portion of it ' which is the end 
and term of natural philosophy in the intention of man.' 
Under these heads of Morality and Policy, the whole subject 
is treated here. But to return to the latter. 

The question of Civil Government is, in the light of this 
science, a very difficult one ; and this philosopher, like the one 
we have already quoted on this subject, is disposed to look with 
much suspicion on propositions for violent and sudden renova- 
tions in the state, and immediate abolitions and cures of social 



THE BACONIAN RHETORIC. 97 

evil. He too takes a naturalist's estimate of those larger wholes, 
and their virtues, and faculties of resistance. 

' Civil knowledge is conversant about a subject,' he says, 
' which is, of all others, most immersed in matter, and hardliest 
reduced to axiom. Nevertheless, as <3ato, the censor, said, 
' that the Eomans were like sheep, for that a man might 
better drive a flock of them than one of them, for, in a flock, 
if you could get SOME few to go right, the rest would follow ;' 
so in that respect, MORAL PHILOSOPHY is more difficile than 
policy. Again, moral philosophy propoundeth to itself the 
framing of internal goodness, but civil knowledge requireth 
only an external goodness, for that, as to society, sufficeth. 
Again, States, as great engines, move slowly, and are not so 
soon put out of frame'' (that is what our foreign statist thought 
also) ' for, as in Egypt the seven good years sustained the 
seven bad, so governments for a time, well grounded, do 
bear out errors following. But the resolution of particular 
persons is more suddenly subverted. These respects do somewhat 
qualify the extreme difficulty of civil knowledge.' 

This is the point of attack, then, — this is the point of 
scientific attack, — the resolution of particular persons. He has 
showed us where the extreme difficulty of this subject appears 
to lie in his mind, and he has quietly pointed, at the same time, 
to that place of resistance in the structure of the state, which 
is the key to the whole position. He has marked the spot 
exactly where he intends to commence his political operations. 
For he has discovered a point there, which admits of being 
operated on, by such engines as a feeble man like him, or a 
few such together, perhaps, may command. It is the new 
science that they are going to converge on that point precise- 
ly, namely the resolution of particular persons. It is the 
novum organum that this one is bringing up, in all its finish, 
for the assault of that particular quarter. Hard as that old 
wall is, great as the faculty of conservation is in these old 
structures that hold by time, there is one element running all 
through it, these chemists find, which is within their power, 
namely, the resolution of particular persons. It is the science 

H 



98 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

of the conformation of the parts, it is the constitutional struc- 
ture of the human nature, which, in its scientific development, 
makes men, naturally, members of communities, beautiful and 
felicitous parts of states, — it is that which the man of science 
will begin with. If you will let him have that part of the 
field to work in undisturbed, he will agree not to meddle with 
the state. And beside those general reasons, already quoted, 
which tend to prevent him from urging the immediate appli- 
cation of his science to this ' larger whole,' for its wholesale 
relief and cure, he ventures upon some specifications and 
particulars, when he comes to treat distinctly of government 
itself, and assign to it its place in his new science of affairs. If 
one were to judge by the space he has openly given it on his 
paper in this plan for the human advancement and relief, one 
would infer that it must be a very small matter in his estimate 
of agencies; but looking a little more closely, we find that it is 
not that at all in his esteem, that it is anything but a matter of 
little consequence. It was enough for him, at such a time, to be 
allowed to put down the fact that the art of it was properly 
scientific, and included in his plan, and to indicate the kind of 
science that is wanting to it; for the rest, he gives. us to under- 
stand that he has himself fallen on such felicitous times, and finds 
that affair in the hands of a person so extremely learned in it, 
that there is really nothing to be said. And being thrown 
into this state of speechless reverence and admiration, he con- 
siders that the most meritorious thing he can do, is to pass to 
the other parts of his discourse with as little delay as possible. 
It is a very short paragraph indeed for so long a subject; 
but, short as it is, it is not less pithy, and it contains reasons 
why it should not be longer, and why that new torch of 
science which he is bringing in upon the human affairs gene- 
rally, cannot be permitted to enter that department of them in 
his time. ' The first is, that it is a part of knowledge secret 
and retired in both those respects in which things are deemed 
secret; for some things are secret because they are hard to 
know, and some because they are not fit to utter. Again, the 
wisdom of antiquity, the shadows whereof are in the Poets, in 



THE BACONIAN RHETORIC. 99 

the description of torments and pains, next unto the crime of 
rebellion, which was the giants' offence, doth detest the crime 
of futility, as in Sisyphus and Tantalus. But this was meant 
of particulars. Nevertheless, even unto the general rules and 
discourses of policy and government, [it extends ; for even here] 
there is due a reverent handling/ And after having briefly 
indicated the comprehension ' of this science,' and shown that 
it is the thing he is treating under other heads, he con- 
cludes, ' but considering that I write to a king who is a master 
of it, and is so well assisted, I think it decent to pass over this 
part in silence, as willing to obtain the certificate which one 
of the ancient philosophers aspired unto; who being silent 
when others contended to make demonstration of their 
abilities by speech, desired it might be certified for his part 
( that there was one that knew how to hold his peace.' 

And having thus distinctly cleared himself of any suspicion 
of a disposition to introduce scientific inquiry and innovation 
into departments not then open to a procedure of that sort, 
his proposal for an advancement of learning in other quarters 
was, of course, less liable to criticism. But even that part of 
the subject to which he limits himself involves, as we shall see, 
an incidental reference to this, from which he here so modestly 
retires, and affords no inconsiderable scope for that genius 
which was by nature so irresistibly impelled, in one way or 
another, to the criticism and reformation of the larger wholes. 
He retires from the open assault, but it is only to go deeper 
into his subject. He is constituting the science of that from 
which the state proceeds. He is analyzing the state, and 
searching out in the integral parts of it, that which makes true 
states impossible. He has found the revolutionary forces in 
their simple forms, and is content to treat them in these. He 
is bestowing all his pains upon an art that will develop — on 
scientific principles, by simply attending to the natural laws, 
as they obtain in the human kind, royalties, and nobilities, 
and liege-men of all degrees — an art that will make all kinds 
of pieces that the structure of the state requires. 

H 2 



100 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE SCIENCE OF MORALITY. 

§ I. — THE EXEMPLAR OF GOOD. 

' Nature craves 
All dues to be rendered to their owners.' 

"OUT this great innovator is busying himself here with 
•*-" drawing up a report of the deficiencies in learn- 
ing; and though he is the first to propose a plan and method 
by which men shall build up, systematically and scientifically, 
a knowledge of Nature in general, instead of throwing them- 
selves altogether upon their own preconceptions and abstract 
controversial theories, after all, the principal deficiency which 
he has to mark — that to which, even in this dry report, he 
finds himself constrained to affix some notes of admiration — 
this principal deficiency is THE Science OF Man — THE 
SCIENCE of human nature itself. And the reason of this 
deficiency is, that very deficiency before named; it is that 
very act of shutting himself up to his own theories which 
leaves the thinker without a science of himself. ' For it is the 
greatest proof of want of skill, to investigate the nature of any 
object in itself alone; and, in general, those very things which 
are considered as secret, are manifested and common in other 
objects, but will never be clearly seen if the contemplations and 
experiments of men be directed to themselves alone! It is this 
science of Nature in general which makes the science 
of Human Nature lor the first time possible; and that is 
the end and term of the new philosophy, — so the inventor of 
it tells us. And the moment that he comes in with that new 
torch, which he has been out into ' the continent of nature' to 
light, — the moment that he comes back with it, into this old 
debateable ground of the schools, and begins to apply it to 



THE BACONIAN RHETORIC. IOI 

that element in the human life in which the scientific inno- 
vation appears to be chiefly demanded, ' most of the contro- 
vies,' as he tells us very simply — 'rnost of the controversies, 
wherein moral philosophy is conversant, are judged and deter- 
mined by it.' 

But here is the bold and startling criticism with which he 
commences his approach to this subject; here is the ground 
which he makes at the first step; this is the ground of his 
scientific innovation ; not less important than this, is the field 
which he finds unoccupied. In the handling of this science he 
says, (the science of ' the Appetite and Will of Man'), ' those 
which have written seem to me to have done as if a man that 
professed to teach to write did only exhibit fair copies of alpha- 
bets and letters joined, without giving any precepts or direc- 
tions for the carriage of the hand, or the framing of the letters; 
so have they made good and fair exemplars and copies, carrying 
the draughts and portraitures of good, virtue, duty , felicity ; pro- 
pounding them, well described, as the true objects and scopes 
of man's will and designs; but how to attain these excellent 
marks, and how to frame and subdue the will of man to become 
true and conformable to these pursuits, they pass it over alto- 
gether, or slightly and unpr o fit ably ; for it is not,' he says, 
'certain scattered glances and touches that can excuse the 
absence of this part of — SCIENCE. 

' The reason of this omission,' he supposes, ' to be that 
hidden rock, whereupon both this and many other barks of 
knowledge have been cast away, which is, that men have 
despised to be conversant in ordinary and common matters, the 
judicious direction whereof, nevertheless, is the wisest doctrine; 
for life consisteth not in novelties nor subtleties, but, contrari- 
wise, they have compounded sciences chiefly of a certain re- 
splendent or lustrous mass of matter, chosen to give glory either 
to the subtlety of disputations, or to the eloquence of discourses.' 
But his theory of teaching is, that ' Doctrine should be such 
as should make men in love with the lesson, and not with the 
teacher ; being directed to the auditor's benefit, and not to the 
author's commendation. Neither needed men of so excellent 



102 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

parts to have despaired of a fortune which the poet Virgil 
promised himself, and, indeed, obtained, who got as much 
glory of eloquence, wit, and learning, in the expressing of the 
observations of husbandry as of the heroical acts of JEneas. 

1 Nee sum animi dubius, verbis ea vincere magnum 
Quam sit, et angustis hunc addere rebus honorum.' ' 

Georg. iii. 289. 

So, then, there is room for a new Virgil, but his theme is 
here; — one who need not despair, if he be able to bring to his 
subject those excellent parts this author speaks of, of getting 
as much glory of eloquence, wit, and learning, in the express- 
ing of the observations of this husbandry, as those have had 
who have sketched the ideal forms of the human life, the 
dream of what should be. The copies and exemplars of good, 
— that vision of heaven, — that idea of felicity, and beauty, 
and goodness that the human soul brings with it, like a 
memory, — those celestial shapes that the thought and heart 
of man, by a law in nature, project, — that garden of delights 
that all men remember, and yearn for, and aspire to, and will 
have, in one form or another, in delicate air patterns, or 
gross deceiving images, — that large, intense, ideal good which 
men desire — that perfection and felicity, so far above the rude 
mocking realities which experience brings them, — that, that 
has had its poets. No lack of these exemplars the historian 
finds, when he comes to make out his report of the con- 
dition of his kind — where he comes to bring in his inventory 
of the human estate : when so much is wanting, that good he 
reports ' not deficient.' Edens in plenty, — gods, and demi-gods, 
and heroes, not wanting; the purest abstract notions of virtue 
and felicity, the most poetic embodiments of them, are put 
down among the goods which the human estate, as it is, 
comprehends. This part of the subject appears, to the critical 
reviewer, to have been exhausted by the poets and artists that 
mankind has always employed to supply its wants in this field. 
No room for a poet here ! The draught of the ideal Eden is 
finished; — the divine exemplar is finished; that which is 
wanting is, — the husbandnj thereunto. 



THE BACONIAN RHETORIC. IO3 

Till now, the philosophers and poetic teachers had always 
taken their stand at once, on the topmost peak of Olympus, 
pouring down volleys of scorn, and amazement, and reprehen- 
sion, upon the vulgar nature they saw beneath, made out of 
the dust of the ground, and qualified with the essential attri- 
butes of that material, — kindled, indeed, with a breath of 
heaven, but made out of clay, — different kinds of clay, — 
with more or less of the Promethean spark in it; but always 
clay, of one kind or another, and always compelled to listen 
to the laws that are common to the kinds of that substance. 
And it was to this creature, thus bound by nature, thus doubly 
bound, — ' crawling between earth and heaven,' as the poet 
has it, — that these winged philosophers on the ideal cliffs, 
thought it enough to issue their mandates, commanding it to 
renounce its conditions, to ignore its laws, and come up thither 
at a word, — at a leap, — making no ado about it. 

' I can call spirits from, the vasty deep.' 
' And so can I, and so can any man ; ' 
Says the new philosopher — 
'But will they come 1 
Will they come — when you do call for them 1 ' 

It was simply a command, that this dirty earth should con- 
vert itself straight into Elysian lilies, and bloom out, at a word, 
with roses of Paradise. Excellent patterns, celestial exemplars, 
of the things required were held up to it ; and endless decla- 
mation and argument why it should be that, and not the other, 
were not wanting: — but as to any scientific inquiry into the 
nature of the thing on which this form was to be superin- 
duced, as to any scientific exhibition of the form itself which 
was to be superinduced, these so essential conditions of the pro- 
posed result, were in this case alike wanting. The position 
which these reformers occupy, is one so high, that the question 
of different kinds of soils, and chemical analyses and experi- 
ments, would not come within their range at all; and 'the 
resplendent or lustrous mass of matter,' of which their 
sciences are compounded, chosen to give glory either to the 
subtil ty of disputations or to the eloquence of discourses, would 



104 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

not bear any such vulgar admixture. It would make a terrible 
jar in the rhythm, which those large generalizations naturally 
flow in, to undertake to introduce into them any such points 
of detail. 

And the new teacher will have a mountain too ; but it will 
be one that ' overlooks the vale,' and he will have a rock-cut- 
stair to its utmost summit. He is one who will undertake this 
despised unlustrous matter of which our ordinary human life 
consists, and make a science of it, building up its generaliza- 
tions from its particulars, and observing the actual reality, — 
the thing as it is, freshly, for that purpose ; and not omitting 
any detail, — the poorest. The poets who had undertaken this 
theme before had been so absorbed with the idea of what man 
should be, that they could only glance at him as he is: the idea 
of a science of him, was not of course, to be thought of. There 
was but one name for the creature, indeed, in their vocabulary 
and doctrine, and that was one which simply seized and embodied 
the general fact, the unquestionable historic fact, that he has 
not been able hitherto to attain to his ideal type in nature, or 
indeed to make any satisfactory approximation to it. 

But when the Committee of Inquiry sits at last, and the 
business begins to assume a systematic form, even the science 
of that ideal good, that exemplar and pattern of good, which 
men have been busy on so long, — the science of it, — is put 
down as ( wanting,' and the science of the husbandry thereunto, 
1 wholly deficient' 

And the report is, that this new argument, notwithstanding 
its every-day theme, is one that admits of being sung also ; and 
that the Virgil who is able to compose ' these Georgics of the 
Mind,' may promise himself fame, though his end is one that 
will enable him to forego it. Let us see if we can find any 
further track of him and his great argument, whether in prose 
or verse; — this poet who cares not whether he has his ' singing 
robes' about him or not, so he can express and put upon record 
his new ' observations of this husbandry.' 

I. The exemplar of good. — ' And surely,' he continues, 
' if the purpose be in good earnest, not to write at leisure that 



THE BACONIAN RHETORIC. 105 

which men may read at leisure — note it — that which men may 
read at leisure — 'but really to instruct and suborn action and 
active life, these GEORGICS of the mind, concerning the hus- 
bandry and tillage thereof, are no less worthy than the heroical 
descriptions of virtue, duty, and felicity ; therefore the main and 
primitive division of moral knowledge, seemeth to be into 
the exemplar or platform of good, and the regimen 
or culture OF the mind, the one describing the nature 
of GOOD, the other prescribing rules how to SUBDUE, apply, 

and ACCOMMODATE THE WILL OF MAN THEREUNTO. 

As to l the nature of good, positive or simple/ the writers on 
this subject have, he says, ' set it down excellently, in describ- 
ing the forms of virtue and duty, with their situations, and 
postures, in distributing them into their kinds, parts, pro- 
vinces, actions, and administrations, and the like : nay, farther, 
they have commended them to man's nature and spirit, with 
great quickness of argument, and beauty of persuasions; yea, 
and fortified and entrenched them, as much as discourse can do, 
against corrupt and popular opinions. And for the degrees 
and comparative nature of good, they have excellently handled 
it also.' — That part deserveth to be reported for f excellently 
laboured. 5 

What is it that is wanting then? What radical, fatal defect 
is it that he finds even in the doctrine of the NATURE of 
GOOD? What is the difficulty with this platform and exemplar 
of good as he finds it, notwithstanding the praise he has be- 
stowed on it ? The difficulty is, that it is not scientific. It is 
not broad enough. It is special, it is limited to the species, 
but it is not properly, it is not effectively, specific, because it 
is not connected with the doctrine of nature in general. It 
does not strike to those universal original principles, those 
simple powers which determine the actual historic laws and 
make the nature of things itself. This is the criticism, there- 
fore, with which this critic of the learning of the world as he 
finds it, is constrained to qualify that commendation. 

Notwithstanding, if before they had come to the popular and 
received notions of 1 vice" 1 and 'virtue? 'pleasure' and ( pain,' and 



106 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OP TRADITION. 

the rest, they had stayed a little longer upon the inquiry con- 
cerning the ROOTS of good and evil, and the strings to 
those roots, they had given, in my opinion, a great light to 
that which followed, and especially if they had consulted with 
nature, they had made their doctrines less prolix and more pro- 
found, which being by them in part omitted, and in part 
handled with much confusion, we will endeavour to resume 
and open in a more clear manner.' Here then, is the prepa- 
ration of the Platform or Exemplar of Good, the scientific 
platform of virtue and felicity; going behind the popular 
notion of vice and virtue, pain and pleasure, and the like, 
he strikes at once to the nature of good, as it is ' formed in 
everything,' for the foundation of this specific science. He 
lays the beams of it, in the axioms and definitions of his 
1 prima philosophia ' 'which do not fall within the compass of 
of the special parts of science, but are more common and of a 
higher stage, for ' the distributions and partitions of know- 
led ffes are not like several lines that meet in one ancde, and 
so touch but in a point, but are like branches of a tree that 
meet in a stem which hath a dimension and quantity of entire- 
ness and continuance before it comes to discontinue and break 
itself into arms and boughs/ and it is not the narrow and spe- 
cific observation on which the popular notions are framed, but 
the scientific, which is needed for the IS'ew Ethics, — the new 
knowledge, which here too, is power. He must detect and 
recognise here also, he must track even into the nature of man, 
those universal ' footsteps ' which are but ' the same footsteps of 
nature treading or printing in different substances.' ' There is 
formed in everything a double nature of good, the one as every- 
thing is a total or substantive in itself, and the other, as it is a 
part or member of a greater body whereof the latter is in 
degree the greater and the worthier, because it tendeth to the 

conservation of a more general form This double nature 

of good, and the comparison thereof, is much more engraven 
upon man, if he degenerate not, unto whom the conservation of 
duty to the public, ought to he much more precious than the 
conservation of life and being ? and, by way of illustration, he 



THE BACONIAN EHETORIC. 107 

mentions first the ease of Pompey the Great, 'who being in 
commission of purveyance for a famine at Rome, and being dis- 
suaded with great vehemency by his friends, that he should not 
hazard himself to sea in an extremity of weather, he said 
only to them, 'Necesse est ut earn, non ut vivam. 1 ' But,' he adds, 
' it may be truly affirmed, that there was never any philosophy, 
religion, or other discipline, which did so plainly and highly 
exalt the good which is communicative, and depress the good 
which is private and particular, as the holy faith, well declaring 
that it was the same God that gave the Christian law to men, who 
gave those laws of nature to inanimate creatures that we spake 
of before ; for we read that the elected saints of God have wished 
themselves anathematised, and razed out of the book of life, in 
an ecstasy of charity, and infinite feeling of communion.' 

And having first made good his assertion, that this being 
set down, and strongly p>lanted, determines most of the contro- 
versies wherein moral philosophy is conversant, he proceeds to 
develop still further these scientific notions of good and evil, 
which he has gone below the popular notions and into the 
nature of things to find, these scientific notions, which, because 
they are scientific, he has still to go out of the specific nature 
to define; and when he comes to nail down his scientific plat- 
form of the human good with them, when he comes to strike 
their clear and simple lines, deep as the universal constitu- 
tion of things, through the popular terms, and clear up the old 
confused theories with them, we find that what he said of 
them beforehand was true; they do indeed throw great light 
upon that which follows. 

To that exclusive, incommunicative good which inheres in 
the private and particular nature, — and he does not call it any 
hard names at all from his scientific platform; indeed in the 
vocabulary of the Naturalist we are told, that these names are 
omitted, ' for we call a nettle but a nettle, and the faults of 
fools their folly,' — that exclusive good he finds both passive 
and active, and this also is one of those primary distinctions 
which c is formed in all things/ and so too is the subdivision 
of passive good which follows. ' For there is impressed upon 



* 



108 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

all things a triple desire, or appetite, proceeding from lone to 
themselves', one, of preserving and continuing their form; 
another, of advancing and perfecting their form; and a third, 
of multiplying and extending their form upon other things; 
whereof the multiplying or signature of it upon other things, 
is that which we handled by the name of active good.' But 
passive good includes both conservation and perfection, or 
advancement, which latter is the highest degree of passive 
good. For to preserve in state is the less; to preserve with 
advancement is the greater. As to man, his approach or 
assumption to divine or angelical nature is the perfec- 
tion of his form, the error or false imitation of which good is 
that which is the tempest of human life.' So we have heard 
before; but in the doctrine which we had before, it was the 
dogma, — the dogma whose inspiration and divinity each soul 
recognized; to whose utterance each soul responded, as deep 
calleth unto deep, — it was the Law, the Divine Law, and not 
the science of it, that was given. 

And having deduced ' that good of man which is private 
and particular, as far as seemeth fit/ he returns ' to that good 
of man which respects and beholds society,' which he terms 
' Duty, because the term of duty is more proper to a mind 
well framed and disposed towards others, as the term of Virtue 
is applied to a mind well formed and composed in itself; though 
neither can a man understand virtue, without some relation to 
society, nor duty, without an inward dispositio7i. 

But he wishes us to understand and remember, now that he 
comes out of the particular nature, and begins to look towards 
society with this term of Duty, that he is still dealing with 
1 the will of particular persons,' that it is still the science of 
morals, and not politics, that he is meddling with. ' This part 
may seem at first/ he says, Ho pertain to science civil and 
politic, but not if it be well observed; for it concerneth the 
regiment and government of every man over himself, and not 
over others. And this is the plan which he has marked out 
in his doctrine of government as the most hopeful point in 
which to commence political reformations; and one cannot but 



THE BACONIAN RHETORIC. IO9 

observe, that if this art and science should be successfully cul- 
tivated, the one which he dismisses so briefly would be cleared 
at once of some of those difficulties, which rendered any more 
direct treatment of it at that time unadvisable. This part of 
learning concerneth then ' the regiment and government of 
every man over himself, and not over others.' ' As in archi- 
tecture the direction of the framing the posts, beams, and other 
parts of building, is not the same with the manner of joining 
them and erecting the building; and in mechanicals, the di- 
rection how to frame AN instrument OR engine is not the 
same with the manner of setting it on work, and employing it; 
and yet, nevertheless, in expressing of the one, you incidentally 
express the aptness towards the other [hear] so the doctrine of 
the conjugation of men in society differeth from that of their 
conformity thereunto. 1 The received doctrine of that conjuga- 
tion certainly appeared to ; and the more this scientific doctrine 
of the parts, and the conformity thereunto, is incidentally 
expressed, — the more the scientific direction how to frame the 
instrument or engine, is opened, the more this difference be- 
comes apparent. 

But even in limiting himself to the individual human 
nature as it is developed in particular persons, regarding 
society only as it is incidental to that, even in putting down 
his new scientific platform of the good that the appetite and 
will of man naturally seeks, and in marking out scientifically 
its degrees and kinds, he gives us an opportunity to perceive in 
passing, that he is not altogether without occasion for the use 
of that particular art, with its peculiar c organs' and ' methods' 
and ' illustration,' which he recommends under so many heads 
in his treatise on that subject, for the delivery or tradition 
of knowledges, which tend to innovation and advancement — 
knowledges which are e progressive' and e foreign from opinions 
received/ 

This doctrine of duty is sub-divided into two parts; the 
common duty of every man as a MAN, or A member of A 
STATE, which is that part of the platform and exemplar of 
good, he has before reported as ' extant, and well laboured/ 



110 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

the other is the respective or special duty of every man in his 
PROFESSION, VOCATION and PLACE; and it is under this 
head of the special and respective duties of places, vocations 
and professions, where the subject begins to grow narrow and 
pointed, where it assumes immediately, the most critical 
aspects, — it is here that his new arts of delivery and tradition 
come in to such good purpose, and stand him instead of other 
weapons. For this is one of those cases precisely, which the 
philosopher on the Mountain alluded to, where an argument is 
set on foot at the table of a man of prodigious fortune, when 
the man himself is present. Nowhere, perhaps, — in his freest 
forms of writing, does he give a better reason, for that so 
deliberate and settled determination, which he so openly 
declares, and everywhere so stedfastly manifests, not to put 
himself in an antagonistic attitude towards opinions, and 
vocations, and professions, as they stood authorized in his 
time. Nowhere does he venture on a more striking compari- 
son or simile, for the purpose of setting forth that point 
vividly, and impressing it on the imagination of the readers 

' The first of these [sub-divisions of duty] is extant, and 
well laboured, as hath been said. The second, likewise, I 
may report rather dispersed than deficient ; which manner of 
disptersed argument I acknowledge to be best; [it is one he is 
much given to;] for who can take upon him to write of the 
proper duty, virtue, challenge and right of every several 
vocation, profession and place? [ — truly? — ] For although 
sometimes a looker on, may see more than a gamester, and 
there be a proverb more arrogant than sound, ' that the vale 
best discovereth the hill,' yet there is small doubt, that men 
can write best, and most really and materially of their own 
professions,' and it is to be wished, he says, ' as that which 
would make learning, indeed, solid and fruitful, that active 
men would, or could, become writers.' And he proceeds to 
mention opportunely in that connection, a case very much 
in point, as far as he is concerned, but not on the face of it, so 
immediately to the purpose, as that which follows. It will, 
however, perhaps, repay that very careful reading of it, which 



THE BACONIAN RHETORIC. Ill 

will be necessary, in order to bring out its pertinence in this 
connection. And we shall, perhaps, not lose time ourselves, 
by taking, as we pass, the glimpse which this author sees fit to 
give us, of the facilities and encouragements which existed 
then, for the scientific treatment of this so important question 
of the duties and vices of vocations and professions. 

'In which I cannot but mention, honoris causa, your majesty s 
excellent book, touching the duty of A king-' [and he goes on 
to give a description which applies, without much c forcing/ 
to the work of another king, which he takes occasion to intro- 
duce, with a direct commendation, a few pages further on] 
— ' a work richly compounded of divinity, morality, and policy, 
with great aspersion of all other arts; and being, in mine 
opinion, one of the most sound and healthful writings that I 
have read. Not sick of business, as those are who lose them- 
selves in their order, nor of convulsions, as those which cramp 
in matters impertinent; not savoring of perfumes and paintings 
as those do, who seek to please the reader more than nature 
beareth, and chiefly well disposed in the spirits thereof, being 
agreeable to truth, and apt for action;' — [this passage contains 
some hints as to this author's notion of what a book should be, 
in form, as well as substance, and, therefore, it would not be 
strange, if it should apply to some other books, as well] — 
' and far removed from that natural infirmity, whereunto 1 
noted those that write in their own professions, to be subject, 
which is that they exalt it above measure; for your majesty hath 
truly described, not a king of Assyria or Persia, in their external 
glory, [and not that kind of king, or kingly author is he talking 
of] but a Moses, or a David, pastors of their people. 

e Neither can I ever lose out of my remembrance, what I 
heard your majesty, in the same sacred spirit of government, 
deliver in a great cause of judicature, which was, that kings 
ruled by their laws, as God did by the laws of nature, and 
ought rarely to put in use their supreme prerogative, as God 
doth his power of working miracles. And yet, notwithstanding, 
in your book of a free monarchy, you do well give men to un- 
derstand, that you know the plenitude of the power and right of 



112 THE ELIZABETHAN AET OP TRADITION. 

a king, as well as the circle of his office and duty. Thus have I 
presumed to allege this excellent writing of your majesty, as a 
prime or eminent example of Tractates, concerning special and 
respective duties/ [It is, indeed, an exemplar that he talks of 
here.] ' Wherein i" should have said as much, if it had been 
written a thousand years since : neither am I moved with cer- 
tain courtly decencies, which I esteem it flattery to praise in 
presence ; no, it is flattery to praise in absence : that is, when 
either the virtue is absent, or — the occasion is absent, and so the 
praise is not natural, but forced, either in truth, or — in time. 
But let Cicero be read in his oration pro Mar cello, which is 
nothing but an excellent table of Caesars VIRTUE, and 
made to his face; besides the example of many other excellent 
persons, wiser a great deal than such observers, and we will 
never doubt upon a full occasion, to give just praises to present 
or absent. 1 

The reader who does not think that is, on the whole, a 
successful paragraph, considering the general slipperiness of 
the subject, and the state of the ice in those parts of it, in 
particular where the movements appear to be the most free 
and graceful; such a one has, probably, failed in applying to 
it, that key of i times,' which a full occasion is expected to 
produce for this kind of delivery. But if any doubt exists in 
any mind, in regard to this author's opinion of the rights of 
his own profession and vocation, and the circle of its office and 
duties, — if any one really doubts what only allegiance this 
author professionally acknowledges, and what kingship it is to 
which this great argument is internally dedicated, it may be 
well to recall the statement on that subject, which he has 
taken occasion to insert in another part of the work, so that 
that point, at least, may be satisfactorily determined. 

He is speaking of ' certain base conditions and courses/ in 
his criticism on the manners of learned men, which he says, 
' he has no purpose to give allowance to, wherein divers pro- 
fessors of learning have wronged themselves and gone too far,' — 
glancing in particular at the trencher philosophers of the later 
age of the Eoman state, ' who were little better than parasites 



THE BACONIAN RHETORIC. 113 

in the houses of the great. But above all the rest,' he con- 
tinues, e the gross and palpable flattery, whereunto, many, not 
unlearned, have abased and abused their wits and pens, turn- 
ing, as Du Bartas saith, Hecuba into Helena, and Faustina 
into Lucretia, hath most diminished the price and estima- 
tion of learning. Neither is the modern dedication, of books 
and writings as to patrons, to be commended : for that books — 
such as are worthy the name of books, ought to have no patrons, 
but — (hear) but — Truth and Reason. And the ancient custom 
was to dedicate them only to private and equal friends, or to 
iniitle the books with their names, or if to kings and great 
persons, it was some such as the argument of the book was fit 
and proper for: but these and the like courses may deserve 
rather reprehension than defence. 

1 Not that I can tax,' he continues, however, ' or condemn 
the morigeration or application of learned men to men in 
fortune.' And he proceeds to quote here, approvingly, a 
series of speeches on this very point, which appear to be full 
of pertinence ; the first of the philosopher who, when he was 
asked in mockery, ' How it came to pass that philosophers 
were followers of rich men, and not rich men of philosophers,' 
answered soberly, and yet sharply, ' Because the one sort knew 
what they had need of, and the other did not'. And then the 
speech of Aristippus, who, when some one, tender on behalf of 
philosophy, reproved him that he would offer the profession of 
philosophy such an indignity, as for a private suit to fall at 
a tyrant's feet, replied, ' It was not his fault, but it was the 
fault of Dionysius, that he had his ears in his feet'; and, 
lastly, the reply of another, who, yielding his point in disput- 
ing with Caesar, claimed, ' That it was reason to yield to him 
who commanded thirty legions,' and 'these,' he says, 'these, and 
the like applications, and stooping to points of necessity and 
convenience, cannot be disallowed ; for, though they may have 
some outward baseness, yet, in & judgment truly made, they are to 
be accounted submissions to the occasion, and not to the person! 

And that is just Volumnids view of the subject, as will be 
seen in another place. 

1 



114 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

Now, this no more dishonors you at all, 

Than to take in a town with gentle words, 

Which else would put you to your fortune, and 

The hazard of much blood. — 

And you will rather show our general louts 

How you can frown, than spend a fawn upon them, 

For the inheritance of their loves, and safeguard 

Of what that want might ruin. 

But then, in the dramatic exhibition, the other side comes 

in too: — 

I will not do 't ; 
Lest I surcease to honor mine own truth, 
And by my body's action, teach my mind 
A most inherent baseness. \ 

It is the same poet who says in another place: — 
Almost my nature is subdued to that it works in. 

' But to return,' as our author himself says, after his compli- 
mentary notice of the king's book, accompanied with that 
emphatic promise to give an account of himself upon a full 
occasion, and we have here, apparently, a longer digression to 
apologize for, and return from ; but, in the book we are consi- 
dering, it is, in fact, rather apparent than real, as are most of 
the author's digressions, and casual introductions of imperti- 
nent matter; for, in fact, the exterior order of the discourse is 
often a submission to the occasion, and is not so essential as the 
author's apparent concern about it would lead us to infer; 
indeed he has left dispersed directions to have this treatise 
broken up, and recomposed in a more lively manner, upon a 
full occasion, and when time shall serve; for, at present, this 
too is chiefly well disposed in the spirits thereof. 

And in marking out the grounds in human life, then lying 
waste, or covered with superstitious and empirical arts and inven- 
tions, in merely showing the fields into which the inventor of this 
new instrument of observation and inference by rule, was then 
proposing to introduce it, and in presenting this new report, and 
this so startling proposition, in those differing aspects and shift- 
ing lights, and under those various divisions which the art of 
delivery and tradition under such circumstances appeared to 
prescribe; having come, in the order of his report, to that 
main ground of the good which the will and appetite of man 



THE BACONIAN RHETORIC. 115 

aspires to, and the direction thereto, — this so labored ground 
of philosophy, — when it was found that the new scientific plat- 
form of good, included — not the exclusive good of the indivi- 
dual form only, but that of those ' larger wholes/ of which 
men are constitutionally parts and members, and the special 
DUTY, — for that is the specific name of this principle of integ- 
rity iu the human kind, that is the name of that larger law, that 
spiritual principle, which informs and claims the parts, and 
conserves the larger form which is the worthier, — when it was 
found that this part included the particular duty of every man 
in his place, vocation, and profession, as well as the common 
duty of men as men, surely it was natural enough to glance 
here, at that particular profession and vocation of authorship, 
and the claims of the respective places of king and subject in 
that regard, as well as at the duty of the king, and the superior 
advantages of a government of laws in general, as being more 
in accordance with the order of nature, than that other mode 
of government referred to. It was natural enough, since this 
subject lies always in abeyance, and is essentially involved in 
the work throughout, that it should be touched here, in its 
proper place, though never so casually, with a glance at those 
nice questions of conflicting claims, which are more fully 
debated elsewhere, distinguishing that which is forced in time, 
from that which is forced in truth, and the absence of the per- 
son, from the absence of the occasion. 

But the approval of that man of prodigious fortune, to 
whom this work is openly dedicated, is always, with this 
author, who understands his ground here so well, that he 
hardly ever fails to indulge himself in passing, with a good 
humoured, side-long, glance at ' the situation,' this approval is 
the least part of the achievement. That which he, too, adores 
in kings, is ■ the throng of their adorers'. It is the sovereignty 
which makes kings, and puts them in its liveries, that he 
bends to ; it is that that he reserves his art for. And this pro- 
posal to run the track of the science of nature through 
this new field of human nature and its higher and highest 
aims, and into the very field of every man's special place, 
and vocation, and profession, could not well be made without 

1 2 



Il6 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

a glance at those difficulties, which the clashing claims of 
authorship, and other professions, would in this case create; 
without a glance at the imperious necessities which threaten 
the life of the new science, which here also imperiously pre- 
scribe the form of its tradition ; he could not go by this 
place, without putting into the reader's hands, with one bold 
stroke, the key of its delivery. 

For it is in the paragraph which follows the compliment to 
the king in his character as an author, in pursuing still further 
this subject of vocations and professions, that we find in the 
form of 'fable ' and ' allusion] — that form which the author 
himself lays down in his Art of Tradition, as the form of in- 
culcation for new truth, — the precise position, which is the 
key to this whole method of new sciences, which makes the 
method and the interpretation, the vital points, in the writing 
and the reading of them. 

' But, to return, there belongeth farther to the handling of 
this part, touching the Duties of Professions and Vocations, a 
relative, or opposite, touching the frauds, cautels, impostures and 
vices of every jJfbfession, which hath been likewise handled. 
But how? Rather in a satire and cynically, than seriously and 
wisely; for men have rather sought by wit to deride and tra- 
duce much of that which is good in professions, than with 
judgment to discover and sever that which is corrupt. For, 
as Solomon saith, he that cometh to seek after knowledge 
with a mind to scorn and censure, shall be sure to find matter 
for his humour, but no matter for his instruction. But the 
managing of this argument with integrity and truth, which I 
note as deficient, seemeth to me to be one of the best fortifica- 
tions for honesty and virtue that can be planted. For, as the 
fable goeth of the basilisk, that if he see you first, you die for 
it, but if YOU SEE HIM EIRST — HE DIETH; so it is with 
deceits and evil arts, which if they be first espied lose their 
life, but if they prevent, endanger.' [If they see you first 
you die for it ; and not you only, but your science. 

Yet were there but this single plot to lose, 
This'inould of Marcius, they to dust should grind it, 
And throw it against the wind.] 



THE BACONIAN RHETORIC. 117 

1 So that we are much beholden/ he continues, ' to Machiavel 
and others that write what men do, and not what they ought 
to do, [perhaps he refers here to that writer before quoted, who 
writes, 'others form men, — ■ /report hiin']; 'for it is not pos- 
sible/ continues the proposer of the science of special duties 
of place, and vocation, and profession, ' the critic of this 
department, too, — it is not possible to join the serpentine 
wisdom with the columbine innocency, except men know ex- 
actly all the conditions of the serpent, — that is, all forms and 
natures of evil, for without this, virtue lieth open and un- 
fenced. Nay, an honest man can do no good upon those that 
are wicked, to reclaim them, without the help of the knowledge 
of evil : for men of corrupted minds pre-suppose that honesty 
groweth out of simplicity of manners, and believing of preachers, 
schoolmasters, and men's exterior language ; so as, except you 
can make them perceive that you know the utmost reaches of 
their own corrupt .opinions, they despise all morality.' A 
book composed for the express purpose of meeting the diffi- 
culty here alluded to, has been already noticed in the prece- 
ding pages, on account of its being one of the most striking 
samples of that peculiar style of tradition, which the ad- 
vancement of Learning prescribes, and here is another, in 
which the same invention and discovery appears to be in- 
dicated : — ' Why I can teach you/ — says a somewhat doubt- 
ful claimant to supernatural gifts : 

' Why, I can teach you, cousin, to command 
The devil.' 

' And I can teach thee, coz, to shame the devil ; 
By telling truth ; 

If thou hast power to raise him, bring him hither, 
And I'll be sworn I have power to shame him hence : 
Oh, while you live, tell truth.' 

But this is the style, in which the one before referred to, 
falls in with the humour of this Advancer of Learning. 
As to the rest, I have enjoined myself to dare to say, all 
that I dare to do, and even thoughts that are not to be pub- 
lished, displease me. The wors^. of my actions and qualities 



< 



Il8 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

do not appear to me so foul, as I find it foul and base 
not to dare to own them. Every one is wary and discreet in 
confession, but men ought to be so in action. I wish that this 
excessive license of mine, may draw men to freedom above 
these timorous and mincing pretended virtues, sprung from our 
imperfections, and that at the expense of my immoderation, I 
may reduce them to reason. A man must see and study his 
vice to correct it, they who conceal it from others, commonly 
conceal it from themselves and do not think it covered enough, 
if they themselves see it ... . the diseases of the soul, the 
greater they are, keep themselves the more obscure; the most 
sick are the least sensible of them : for these reasons they must 
often be dragged into light, by an unrelenting and pitiless 
hand ; they must be opened and torn from the caverns and se- 
cret recesses of the heart/ ' To meet the Huguenots, who con- 
demn our auricular and private confession, I confess myself in 
public, religiously and purely, — others have published the 
errors of their opinions, I of my manners. I am greedy of 
making myself known, and I care not to how many, provided 
it be truly ; or rather, I hunger for nothing, but I mortally 
hate to be mistaken by those who happen to come across my 
name. He that does all things for honor and glory [as some 
great men in that time were supposed to,] what can he think 
to gain by showing himself to the world in a mask, and by con- 
cealing his true being from the people ? Commend a hunchback 
for his fine shape, he has a right to take it for an affront: if 
you are a coward, and men commend you for your valor, is it 
of you that they speak? They take you for another. Ar- 
chelaus, king of Macedon, walking along the street, somebody 
threw water on his head ; which they who were with him said 
he ought to punish* ' Ay, but,' said the other, 'he did not throw 
the water upon me, but upon him whom he took me to be. 
Socrates being told that people spoke ill of him, ' Not at all,' 
said he, ' there is nothing in me of what they say ! i" am 
content to be less commended provided I am better known. I may 
be reputed a wise man, in such a sort of wisdom as I take to 
be folly/ Truly the Advancement of Learning would seem 



THE BACONIAN RHETORIC. Iig 

to be not all in the hands of one person in this time. It 
appears, indeed, to have been in the hands of some persons 
who were not content with simply propounding it, and noting 
deficiencies, but who busied themselves with actively carrying 
out, the precise plan propounded. Here is one who does not 
content himself with merely criticising 'professions and voca- 
tions,' and suggesting improvements, but one who appears to 
have an inward call himself to the cure of diseases. Whoever 
he may be, and since he seems to care so very little for his 
name himself, and looks at it from such a philosophical point 
of view, we ought not, perhaps, to be too particular about it ; 
whoever he may be, he is unquestionably a Doctor of the New 
School, the scientific school, and will be able to produce his 
diploma when properly challenged; whoever he may be, he 
belongs to ' the Globe/ for the manager of that theatre is in- 
cessantly quoting him, and dramatizing his philosophy, and 
he says himself, ' I look on all men as my compatriots, and 
prefer the universal and common tie to the national.'' 

But in marking out and indicating the plan and method of 
the new operation, which has for its end to substitute a scien- 
tific, in the place of an empirical procedure, in the main 
pursuits of human life, the philosopher does not limit him- 
self in this survey of the special social duties to the special 
duties of professions and vocations. ' Unto this part,' he says, 
' touching respective duty, doth also appertain the duties be- 
tween husband and wife, parent and child, master and servant: 
so likewise the laws of friendship and gratitude, the civil bond 
of companies, colleges, and politic bodies, of neighbourhood, and 
all other proportionate duties; not as they are parts of a 
government and society, but as to the framing of the mind of 
particular persons? 

The reader will observe, that that portion of moral philo- 
sophy which is here indicated, contains, according to this index, 
some extremely important points, points which require learned 
treatment; and in our further pursuit of this inquiry, we 
shall find, that the new light which the science of nature in 
general throws upon the doctrine of the special duties and 



120 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OP TRADITION. 

upon these points here emphasized, has been most ably and 
elaborately exhibited by a contemporary of this philosopher, 
and in the form which he has so specially recommended, — with 
all that rhetorical power which he conceives to be the natural 
and fitting accompaniment of this part of learning. And the 
same is true also throughout of that which follows. 

' The knowledge concerning good respecting society, doth 
handle it also not simply alone, but comparatively, whereunto 
belongeth the weighing of duties between person and person, 
case and case, particular and public, as we see in the proceed- 
ing of Lucius Brutus against his own sons, which was so much 
extolled, yet what was said? 

Infelix utcunque ferent ea fata minores. 

So the case was doubtful, and had opinion on both sides. 
[So the philosopher on the mountain tells us, too, for his 
common-place book and this author's happen to be the same.] 
Again we see when M. Brutus and Cassius invited to a supper 
certain whose opinions they meant to feel, whether they were 
fit to be made their associates, and cast forth the question 
touching the killing of a tyrant, — being an usurper, — they 
were divided in opinion'; [this of itself is a very good specimen 
of the style in which points are sometimes introduced casually 
in passing, and by way of illustration merely] some holding 
that servitude was the extreme of evils, and others that tyranny 
was better than a civil war; and this question also our philo- 
sopher of the mountain has considered very carefully from his 
retreat, weighing all the pros and cons of it. And it is a ques- 
tion which was treated also, as we all happen to know, in that 
other form of writing for which this author expresses so de- 
cided a preference, in which the art of the poet is brought in 
to enforce and impress the conclusion of the philosopher. 
Indeed, as we proceed further with the plan of this so radical 
part of the subject, we shall find, that the ground indicated 
has everywhere been taken up on the spot by somebody, and 
to purpose. 



THE BACONIAN RHETORIC. 121 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE SCIENCE OF MORALITT. 

§ II. — THE HUSBANDRY THEREUNTO; OR, THE CURE AND 
CULTURE OF THE MIND. 

' 'Tis an unweeded garden 

That grows to seed ' 

Hamlet, 

T)UT we have finished now with what he has to say here 
■*-' of the exemplar or science of GOOD, and its hinds, and 
degrees, and the comparison of them , the good that is proper to 
the individual, and the good that includes society. He has 
found much fine work on that platform of virtue, and felicity, 
— excellent exemplars, .the purest doctrine, the loftiest virtue, 
tried by the scientific standard. And though he has gone 
behind those popular names of vice and virtue, pain and plea- 
sure, and the like, in which these doctrines begin, to the more 
simple and original forms, which the doctrine of nature in 
general and its laws supplies, for a platform of moral science, 
his doctrine is large enough to include all these works, in all 
their excellence, and give them their true place. A reviewer 
so discriminating, then, so far from that disposition to scorn 
and censure, which he reprehends, so careful to conserve that 
which is good in his scientific constructions and reformations, 
so pure in judgment in discovering and severing that which is 
corrupt, a reporter so clearly scientific, who is able to main- 
tain through all this astounding report of the deficiences in 
human learning, a tone so quiet, so undemonstrative, such a 
one deserves the more attention when he comes now to ' the 
art and practic part' of this great science, to which all other 
sciences are subordinate, and declares to us that he finds it, as 
a part of science, ' WANTING- !' not defective, but wanting. 
1 Now, therefore, that we have spoken of this fruit of life, 



122 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OP TRADITION. 

it remainetli to speak of the Husbandry that belongeth 
thereunto, without which part the former seemeth to be no 
better than a fair image or statue, which is beautiful to con- 
template, but is without life and motion.' 

But as this author is very far, as he confesses, from wishing 
to clothe himself with the honors of an Innovator, — such 
honors as awaited the Innovator in that time, — but prefers 
always to sustain himself with authority from the past, though 
at the expense of that lustre of novelty and originality, which 
goes far, as he acknowledges, in establishing new opinions, — 
adopting in this precisely the practices, and, generally, to save 
trouble, the quotations of that other philosopher, so largely 
quoted here, who frankly gives his reasons for his procedure, 
confessing that he pinches his authors a little, now and then, 
to make them speak to the purpose; and that he reads them 
with his pencil in his hand, for the sake of being able to 
produce respectable authority, grown gray in trust, with the 
moss of centuries on it, for the views which he has to set 
forth ; culling bits as he wants them, and putting them together 
in his mosaics as he finds occasion; so now, when we come to 
this so important part of the subject, where the want is so 
clearly reported — where the scientific innovation is so unmis- 
takeably propounded — we find ourselves suddenly involved in 
a storm of Latin quotations, all tending to prove that the 
thing was perfectly understood among the ancients, and that 
it is as much as a man's scholarship is worth to call it in ques- 
tion. The author marches up to the point under cover of a 
perfect cannonade of classics, no less than five of the most 
imposing of the Greek and Latin authors being brought out, 
for the benefit of the stunned and bewildered reader, in the 
course of one brief paragraph, the whole concluding with a 
reference to the Psalms, which nobody, of course, will under- 
take to call in question; whereas, in cases of ordinary diffi- 
culty, a proverb or two from Solomon is thought sufficient. 
For this last writer, with his practical inspiration — with his 
aphorisms, or ' dispersed directions,' which the author prefers 
to a methodical discourse, as they best point to action — with 
his perpetual application of divinity to matters of common 



THE BACONIAN RHETORIC. 1 23 

life, and to the special and respective duties, this, of all the 
sacred writers, is the one which he has most frequent occasion 
to refer to; and when, in his chapter on Policy, he brings out 
openly his proposal to invade the every-day practical life of 
men, in its apparently most unaxiomatical department, with 
his scientific rule of procedure — a proposal which he might not 
have been ' so prosperously delivered of,' if it had been made 
in any less considerate manner — he stops to produce whole 
pages of solid text from this so unquestionably conservative 
authority, by way of clearing himself from any suspicion of 
innovation. 

First, then, in setting forth this so novel opinion of his, that 
the doctrine of the fruit of LIFE should include not the 
scientific platform of good, and its degrees and kinds only, — 
not the doctrine of the ideal excellence and felicity only, but 
the doctrine — the scientific doctrine — the scientific art of the 
Husbandry thereunto; — in setting forth the opinion, that that 
first part of moral science is but a part of it, and that as human 
nature is constituted, it is not enough to have a doctrine of 
good in its perfection, and the divinest exemplars of it; first 
of all he produces the subscription of no less a person than 
Aristotle, whose conservative faculties had proved so effectual 
in the dark ages, that the opinion of Solomon himself could 
hardly have been considered more to the purpose. ' In such 
full words,' he says; and seeing that the advancement of 
Learning has already taken us on to a place where the 
opinions of Aristotle, at least, are not so binding, we need not 
trouble ourselves with that long quotation now — ' in such full 
words, and with such iteration, doth he inculcate this part, so 
saith Cicero in great commendation of Cato the second, that 
he had applied himself to philosophy — ' Non ita disputandi 
causa, sed ita vivendi. 1 And although the neglect of our times, 
wherein few men do hold any consultations touching the re- 
formation of their life, as Seneca excellently saith, ' De par- 
tibus vitae, quisque deliberat, de summa nemo,' may make this 
part seem superfluous, yet I must conclude with that aphorism 
of Hippocrates, ' Qui gravi morbo correpti dolores non sentiunt, 



124 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

iis mens asgrotat'; they need medicines not only to assuage 
the disease, but to awake the sense. 

And if it be said that the cure of men's minds belongeth to 
sacred divinity, it is most true; ' but yet Moral Philosophy ' — 
that is, in his meaning of the term, Moral Science, the new- 
science of nature — ' may be preferred unto her, as a wise ser- 
vant and humble handmaid. For, as the Psalm saith, that 
' the eye of the handmaid looketh perpetually towards the 
mistress,' and yet, no doubt, many things are left to the discretion 
of the handmaid, to discern of the mistress's will', so ought 
moral philosophy to give a constant attention to the doctrines of 
divinity, and yet so as it may yield of herself, within due limits, 
many sound and profitable directions/ That is the doctrine. 
That is the position of the New Science in relation to divinity, 
as defined by the one who was best qualified to place it — that 
is the mission of the New Science, as announced by the new 
Interpreter of Nature, — the priest of her ignored and violated 
laws, — on whose work the seal of that testimony which he 
challenged to it has already been set — on whose work it has 
already been written, in the large handwriting of that Provi- 
dence Divine, whose benediction he invoked, ' accepted ' — 
accepted in the councils from which the effects of life proceed. 

' This part, therefore,' having thus defined his position, he 
continues, ' because of the excellency thereof, I cannot but find it 
exceeding STRANGE that it is not reduced to written inquiry; 
the rather because it consisteth of much matter, wherein both 
speech and action is often conversant, and such wherein the 
common talk of men, which is rare, but yet cometh sometimes 
to pass, is wiser than their books. It is reasonable, therefore, 
that we propound it with the more particularity, both for the 
worthiness, and because we may acquit ourselves for reporting it 
deficient 1 [with, such ' iteration and fulness,' with all his discri- 
mination, does he contrive to make this point] ; ' which seemeth 
almost incredible, and is otherwise conceived — [note it] — and 
is otherwise conceived and presupposed by those themselves 
that have written.' [They do not see that they have missed 
it.] ' We will, therefore, enumerate some heads or points 



THE BACONIAN RHETORIC. 1 25 

thereof, that it may appear the better what it is, and whether it 
be extant. 

A momentous question, truly, for the human race. That 
was a point, indeed, for this reporter to dare to make, and 
insist on and demonstrate. Doctrines of THE fruit of Life 
— doctrines of its perfection, exemplars of it; but no science — 
no science of the Culture or the Husbandry thereunto — though 
it is otherwise conceived and presupposed by those who have 
written ! Yes, that is the position ; and not taken in the 
general only, for he will proceed to propound it with more 
particularity — he will give us the heads of it — he will pro- 
ceed to the articulation of that which is wanting — he will 
put down, before our eyes, the points and outlines of the new 
human science, the science of the husbandry thereto, both for 
the worthiness thereof, and that it may appear the better 
what it is, and whether — whether it be extant. For 
who knows but it may be? Who knows, after all, but the 
points and outlines here, may prove but the track of that argu- 
ment which the new Georgics will be able to hide in the play 
of their illustration, as Periander hid his? Who knows but 
the Naturalist in this field was then already on the ground, 
making his collections? Who knows but this new Virgil, 
who thought little of that resplendent and lustrous mass of 
matter, that old poets had taken for their glory, who seized 
the common life of men, and not the ideal life only, for his 
theme — who made the relief of the human estate, and not 
glory, his end, but knew that he might promise himself 
a fame which would make the old heroic poets' crowns grow 
dim, — who knows but that he — he himself — is extant, con- 
templating his theme, and composing its Index — claiming as 
yet its Index only ? Truly, if the propounder of this argument 
can in any measure supply the defects which he outlines, and 
opens here, — if he can point out to us any new and worthy 
collections in that science for which he claims to break the 
ground — if he can, in any measure, constitute it, he will de- 
serve that name which he aspired to, and for which he was 
willing to renounce his own, ' Benefactor of men,' and not of 
an age or nation. 



126 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

But let us see where this new science, and scientific art of 
human culture begins, — this science and art which is to differ 
from those which have preceded it, as the other Baconian arts 
and sciences which began in the new doctrine of nature, 
differed from those which preceded them. 

' First, therefore, in this, as in all things which are practical, 
we ought to cast up our account, what is in our power, and 
what not ? For the one may be dealt with by way of 
alteration, but the other by way of application only. 
The husbandman cannot command either the nature of the 
earth or the seasons of the weather, no more can the physician 
the constitution of the patient, and the variety of accidents. So 
in the culture and cure of the mind of man two things 
are without our command, points of nature, and points 
of FORTUNE : for to the basis of the one, and the conditions 
of the other, our work is limited and tied.' That is the first 
step : that is where the new begins. There is no science or 
art till that step is taken. 

In these things, therefore, it is left unto us to proceed by 
APPLICATION. Vincenda est omnis fortuna ferendo : and so 
likewise — Vincenda est omnis natura ferendo. But when we 
speak of suffering, we do not speak of a dull neglected suffering, 
but of a wise and industrious suffering, which draweth and con- 
triveth use and advantage out of that which seemeth adverse and 
contrary, which is that properly which we call accommodating 
or applying.* 

Now the wisdom of application resteth principally in the 
exact and distinct knowledge of the precedent state or disposition, 
unto which we do apply.' — [This is the process which the 
Novum Organum sets forth with so much care], ' for we cannot 
fit a garment, except we first take the measure of the body.' 

So then THE FIRST ARTICLE OF THIS KNOWLEDGfE is — 

what ? — 'to set down sound and true distributions and descrip- 
tions of THE SEVERAL CHARACTERS AND TEMPERS of MEN'S 



d ' Sweet are the uses of it,' and ' blest ' indeed ' are they who can 
translate the stubbornness of fortune into so quiet and so sweet a style.' 



THE BACONIAN RHETORIC. 1 27 

NATURES and DISPOSITIONS, specially having regard to those 
differences which are most radical, in being the fountains and 
causes of the rest, or most frequent in concurrence or commix- 
ture (not simple differences merely, but the most frequent con- 
junctions), wherein it is not the handling of a few of them, in 
passage, the better to describe the mediocrities of virtues, that 
can satisfy this intention' ; and he proceeds to introduce a few 
points, casually, as it were, and by way of illustration, but the 
rule of interpretation for this digest of learning, in this press of 
method is, that such points are never casual, and usually of 
primal, and not secondary import; ' for if it deserve to be con- 
sidered that there are minds which are proportioned to great 
matters, and others to small, which Aristotle handleth, or 
ought to have handled, by the name of magnanimity, doth it 
not deserve as well to be considered, ' that there are minds 
proportioned to intend many matters, and others to few? So 
that some can divide themselves, others can perchance do exactly 
well, but it must be in few things at once ; and so there cometh 
to be a narrowness of mind, as well as a pusillanimity. 
And again, ' that some minds are proportioned to that which 
may be despatched at once,, or within a short return of time ; 
others to that which begins afar off, and is to be won with 
length of pursuit. 

Jam turn tenditque fovetque. 

So that there may be fitly said to be a longanimity, which is 
commonly also ascribed to God as a magnanimity. 1 Undoubt- 
edly, he considers this one of those differences in the natures 
and dispositions of men, that it is most important to note, 
otherwise it would not be inserted here. ' So farther deserved 
it to be considered by Aristotle that there is a disposition in 
conversation, supposing it in things which do in no sort 
touch or concern a man's self, to soothe and please; and a dis- 
position contrary to contradict and cross' ; and deserveth it 
not much better to be considered that there is a disposition, 
not in conversation, or talk, but in matter of more serious 
nature, and supposing it still in things merely indifferent, to 



128 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

take pleasure in the good of another, and a disposition con- 
trariwise to take distaste at the good of another, which is that 
•properly which we call good-nature, or ill-nature, benignity or 
malignity.' Is not this a field for science, then, with such dif- 
ferences as these lying on the surface of it, — does not it begin 
to open up with a somewhat inviting aspect? This so remark- 
able product of nature, with such extraordinary ' differences' 
in him as these, is he the only thing that is to go without a 
scientific history, all wild and unbooked, while our philoso- 
phers are weeping because ' there are no more worlds to con- 
quer,' because every stone and shell and flower and bird and 
insect and animal has been dragged into the day and had its 
portrait taken, and all its history to its secretest points scien- 
tifically detected ? 

1 And therefore/ says this organizer of the science of nature, 
who keeps an eye on practice, in his speculations, and recom- 
mends to his followers to observe his lead in that respect, at 
least, until the affairs of the world get a little straighter than 
they were in his time, and there is leisure for mere speculation, 
— 'And, therefore,' he resumes, having noted these remarkable 
differences in the natural and original dispositions of men, — 
and certainly there is no more curious thing in science than 
the points noted, though the careful reader will observe that 
they are not curious merely, but that they slant in one di- 
rection very much, and towards a certain kind of practice. 
e And, therefore,' he resumes, noticing that fact, ' / cannot 
sufficiently marvel, that this part of knowledge, touching the 
several characters of natures and dispositions should be omitted 
both in MORALITY and POLICY, considering that it is of so 
great ministry and suppeditation to them BOTH.* But in nei- 
ther of these two departments, which he here marks out, as 
the ultimate field of the naturalist, and his arts, in neither of 



* ' The several characters? The range of difference is limited. They 
are comprehensible within a science, as the differences in other species 
are. No wonder, then, 'that he cannot sufficiently marvel that this 
part of knowledge should be omitted.' 



THE BACONIAN RHETORIC. 1 20, 

them unfortunately, has the practice of mankind, as yet so 
wholly recovered from that ' lameness,' which this critical ob- 
server remarked in it in his own time, that these observations 
have ceased to have a practical interest. 

And having thus ventured to express his surprise at this 
deficiency, he proceeds to note what only indications he ob- 
serves of any work at all in this field, and the very quarters 
he goes to for these little accidental hints and beginnings of 
such a science, show how utterly it was wanting in those 
grandiloquent schools of philosophic theory, and those magis- 
terial chairs of direction, which the author found in possession 
of this department in his time. 

' A man shall find in the traditions of astrology, some 
pretty and apt divisions of men's natures,' — so in the discussions 
which occur on this same point in Lear, where this part of 
philosophy comes under a more particular consideration, and 
the great ministry and suppeditation which it would yield to 
morality and policy is suggested in a different form, this same 
reference to the astrological observations repeatedly occurs. 
The Poet, indeed, discards the astrological theory of these na- 
tural differences in the dispositions of men, but is evidently 
in favour of an observation, and inquiry of some sort, into the 
second causes of these ' sequent effects,' and an anatomy of the 
living subject is in one case suggested, by a person who is 
suffering much from the deficiencies of science in this fieid, 
as a means of throwing light on it. c Then let Regan be 
anatomised.' For in the Play, — in the poetic impersonation, 
which has a scientific purpose for its object, the historical 
extremes of these natural differences are touched, and brought 
into the most vivid dramatic oppositions; so as to force from 
the lips of the by-standers the very inquiries and suggestions 
which are put down here; so as to wring from the broken 
hearts of men — tortured and broken on the wheel, which ' blind 
men' call fortune, — tortured and broken on the rack of an 
unlearned and barbaric human society, — or, from hearts that do 
not break with anything that such a world can do, the impe- 
rious direction of the new science. 

K 



130 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

' Then let Regan be anatomised, and see what it is that 
breeds about her heart.' He has asked already, ' What is the 
cause of thunder?' But l his philosopher' must not stop there. 
' Is there any cause — is there any cause in nature that makes 
these hard hearts ? ' — 

It is the stars ! 
The stars above us govern our conditions, 
Else one self mate and mate could not beget 
Such different issues. 

1 A man shall find in the traditions of astrology some pretty 
and apt divisions of mens natures, ('let them be anatomised,' 
he, too, says,) 'according to the predominance of the planets:' 
(this is the ' spherical predominance? which Edmund does not 
believe in) — ' lovers of quiet, lovers of action, lovers of victory, 
lovers of honour, lovers of pleasure, lovers of arts, lovers of 
change, and so forth.' And here, also, is another very singu- 
lar quarter to go to for a science which is so radical in mo- 
rality; here is a place, where men have empirically hit upon 
the fact that it has some relation to policy. ( A man shall find 
in the wisest sorts of these relations which the Italians make 
touching conclaves, the natures of the several Cardinals, hand- 
somely and livelily painted forth'; — and what he has already 
said in the general, of this department, he repeats here under 
this division of it, that the conversation of men in respect to it, 
is in advance of their books; — 'a man shall meet with, in 
every day's conference, the denominations of sensitive, dry, 
formal, real, humorous, ' huomo di prima impressione, huomo 
di ultima impressione, and the like ' : but this is no substitute 
for science in a matter so radical,' — ' and yet, nevertheless, this 
observation, wandereth in words, but is not fixed in inquiry. 
For the distinctions are found, many of them, but we conclude 
no precepts upon them'; it is induction then that we want 
here, after all — here also — here as elsewhere : the distinc- 
tions are found, many of them, but we conclude no precepts upon 
them: wherein our fault is the greater, because both history, 
poesy, and daily experience, are as goodly fields where 



THE BACONIAN RHETORIC* 13I 

these observations grow ; whereof we make a few poesies to 
hold in our hands, but no man bringeth them to the confec- 
tionary that receipts might be made of them for the use of 
life.' 

How could he say that, when there was a man then alive, 
who was doing in all respects, the very thing which he puts 
down here, as the thing which is to be done, the thing which 
is of such radical consequence, which is the beginning of the 
new philosophy, which is the beginning of the new reforma- 
tion ; who is making this very point in that science to which 
the others are subordinate ? — how could he say it, when there 
was a man then alive, who was ransacking the daily lives of 
men, and putting all history and poesy under contribution 
for these very observations, one, too, who was concluding 
precepts upon them, bringing them to the confectionary, and 
composing receipts of them for the use of life ; a scholar who 
did not content himself with merely reporting a deficiency 
so radical as this, in the human life ; a man who did not think, 
apparently, that he had fulfilled his duty to his kind, by com- 
posing a paragraph on this subject. 

And how comes it — how comes it that he who is the first 
to discover this so fatal and radical defect in the human science, 
has himself failed to put upon record any of these so vital 
observations? How conies it that the one who is at last able 
to put his finger on the spot where the mischief, where all the 
boundless mischief, is at work here, — where the cure must 
begin, should content himself with observations and collections 
in physical history only f How comes it that the man who 
finds that all the old philosophy has failed to become operative 
for the lack of this historical basis, who finds it so c exceeding 
strange, so incredible? who ' cannot sufficiently marvel/ that 
these observations should have been omitted in this science, 
heretofore, — the man who is so sharp upon Aristotle and 
others, on account of this incomprehensible oversight in their 
ethics, — is himself guilty of this very thing ? And how will this 
defect in his work, compare with that same defect which he is 
at so much pains to note and describe in the works of otherg 

k2 



132 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

— others who did not know the value of this history? And 
how can he answer it to his kind, that with the views he has 
dared to put on record here, of the relation, the essential 
relation, of this knowledge to human advancement and 
relief, he himself has done nothing at all to constitute it, except 
to write this paragraph? 

And yet, by his own showing, the discoverer of this field 
was himself the man to make collections in it ; for he tells us 
that accidental observations are not the kind that are wanted 
here, and that the truth of direction must precede the severity 
of observation. Is this so? Whose note book is it then, that 
has come into our hands, with the rules and plummet of the 
new science running through it, where all the observation 
takes, spontaneously, the direction of this new doctrine of 
nature, and brings home all its collection s, in all the lustre of 
their originality, in all their multiplicity, and variety, and 
comprehension, in all the novelty and scientific rigour of 
their exactness, into the channels of these defects of learning? 
And who was he, who thought there were more things in 
heaven and earth, than were dreamt of in old philosophies, 
who kept his tables always by him for open questions? and 
whose tablets — whose many-leaved tablets, are they then, that 
are tumbled out upon us here, glowing with 'all saws, all 
forms, all pressures past, that youth and observation copied 
there.' And if aphorisms are made out of the pith and heart 
of sciences, if ' no man can write good aphorisms who is not 
sound and grounded,' what Wittenberg, what University was 
he bred in? 

Till now there has been no man to claim this new and 
magnificent collection in natural science : it is a legacy that 
came to us without a donor; — this new and vast collection in 
natural history, which is put down here, all along, as that 
which is wanting — as that which is wanting to the science of 
man, to the science of his advancement to his place in nature, 
and to the perfection of his form, — as that which is wanting to 
the science of the larger wholes, and the art of their conserva- 
tion. There was no man to claim it, for the boast, the very boast 



THE BACONIAN RHETORIC. 1 33 

made on behalf of the thing for whom it was claimed — was — 
he did not know it was worth preserving ! — he did not know that 
this mass of new and profoundly scientific observation — this 
so new and subtle observation, so artistically digested, with all 
the precepts concluded on it, strewn, crowded everywhere with 
those aphorisms, those axioms of practice, that are made out 
of the pith and heart of sciences — he did not know it was of 
any value ! That is his history. That is the sum of it, and 
surely it is enough. Who, that is himself at all above the 
condition of an oyster, will undertake to say, deliberately and 
upon reflection, that it is not? So long as we have that 
one fact in our possession, it is absurd, it is simply disgraceful, 
to complain of any deficiency in this person's biography. 
There is enough of it and to spare. With that fact in our 
possession, we ought to have been able to dispense long ago 
with some, at least, of those details that we have of it. The 
only fault to be found with the biography of this individual as 
it stands at present is, that there is too much of it, and the 
public mind is labouring under a plethora of information. 

If that fact be not enough, it is our own fault and not the 
author's. He was perfectly willing to lie by, till it was. He 
would not take the trouble to come out for a time that had not 
studied his philosophy enough to find it, and to put the 
books of it together. 

Many years afterwards, the author of this work on the 
Advancement of Learning, saw occasion to recast it, and put it 
in another language. But though he has had so long a time 
to think about it, and though he does not appear to have 
taken a single step in the interval, towards the supplying of this 
radical deficiency in human science; we do not find that his 
views of its importance are at all altered. It is still the first 
point with him in the scientific culture of human nature, — the 
first point in that Art of Human Life, which is the end and 
term of Natural Philosophy, as he understands the limits of it. 
We still find the first Article of the Culture of the Mind put 

down, ' THE DIFFERENT NATURES OR DISPOSITIONS OF 

men,' not the vulgar propensities to virtues and VICES — note 



134 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

it — or perturbations and passions, but of such as are more 
internal and radical, which are generally neglected.' ' This is 
a study,' he says, which ' might afford great light TO THE 
SCIENCES.' And again he refers us to the existing supply, 
such as it is, and repeats with some amplification, his previous 
suggestions. ' In astrological traditions, the natures and dis- 
positions of men, are tolerably distinguished according to the 
influence of the planets, where some are said to be by nature 
formed for contemplation, others for war, others for politics. 
Apparently it would be ' great ministry and suppeditation to 
policy,' if one could get the occult sources of such differences 
as these, so as to be able to command them at all, in the 
culture of men, or in the fitting of men to their places. ' But' 
he proceeds, 'so likewise among the poets of all kinds, we 
everywhere find characters of nature, though commonly drawn 
with excess and exceeding the limits of nature? 

Here, too, the philosopher refers us again to the common 
discourse of men, as containing wiser observations on this 
subject, than their books. ' But much the best matter of all,' 
he says, ' for such a treatise, may be derived from the more 
prudent historians, and not so well from eulogies or panegyrics, 
which are usually written soon after the death of an illustrious 
person, but much rather from a whole body of history, as often 
as such a person appears, for such an inwoven account gives a 
better description than panegyrics .... But we do not mean that 
such characters should be received in ethics, as perfect civil 
images.'' They are to be subjected to an artistic process, which 
will bring out the radical principles in the dispositions and 
tempers of men in general, as the material of inexhaustible 
varieties of combination. He will have these historic portraits 
merely 'for outlines and first draughts of the images themselves, 
which, being variously compounded and mixed, afford all kinds 
of portraits, so that an artificial and accurate dissection may be 
made of men's minds and natures, and the secret disposition 
of each particular man laid open, that from the knowledge of the 
whole, the precepts concerning the errors of the mind 
may be more rightly formed.' Who did that very thing? 



THE BACONIAN RHETORIC. 1 35 

Who was it that stood on the spot and put that design into 
execution? 

But this is not all; this is only the beginning of the obser- 
vation and study of differences. For he would have also 
included in it, ' those impressions of nature which are other- 
wise imposed upon by the mind, by the SEX, ag-E, country, 
STATE OF health, MAKE OF body, as of beauty and 
deformity, and THE LIKE, which are inherent and not exter- 
nal: and more, he will have included in it — in these practical 
Ethics he will have included — c POINTS OF fortune/ and the 
differences that they make ; he will have all the differences that 
this creature exhibits, under any conditions, put down ; he will 
have his whole nature, so far as his history is able to show it, 
on his table; and not as it is exhibited accidentally, or sponta- 
neously merely, but under the test of a studious inquiry, and 
essay; he will apply to it the trials and vexations of Art, and 
wring out its last confession. This is the practical doctrine of 
this species ; this is what the author we have here in hand, calls 
the science of it, or the beginning of its science. This is one 
of the parts of science which he says is wanting. Let us follow 
his running glimpse of the points here, then, and see whether 
it is extant here, too, and whether there is anything to justify- 
all this preparation in bringing it in, and all this exceeding 
marvelling at the want of it. 

' And again those differences which proceed from FORTUNE, 
as SOVEREIGNTY, NOBILITY, OBSCURE BIRTH, RICHES, 
WANT, MAGISTRACY, PRIVATENESS, PROSPERITY, ADVER- 
SITY, constant fortune, variable fortune, rising per solium, per 
gradus, and the like.' These are articles that he puts down for 
points in his table of natural history, points for the collection of 
instances; this is the tabular preparation for induction here; 
for he does not conclude his precepts on the popular, miscella- 
neous, accidental history. That will do well enough for books. 
It won't do to get out axioms of practice from such loose 
material. They have to ring with the proof of another kind 
of condensation. All his history is artificial, prepared history 
more select and subtle and fit than the other kind, he says, — 



136 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

prepared on purpose ; perhaps we shall come across his tables, 
some day, with these very points on them, filled in with the 
observations of one, so qualified by the truth of direction to 
make them ' severe'. It would not be strange, for he gives us 
to understand that he is not altogether idle in this part of his 
Instauration, and that he does not think it enough to lay out 
work for others, without giving an occasional specimen of his 
own, of the thing which he notes as deficient, and proposes to 
have done, so that there may be no mistake about it as to what 
it really is ; for he appears to think there is some danger of that. 
Even here, he produces a few illustrations of his meaning, that 
it may appear the better what is, and whether it be extant. 

1 And therefore we see, that Plautus maketh it a wonder to 

see an OLD man beneficent. St. Paul concludeth that severity 

of discipline was to be used to the Cretans, (' increpa eos dure'), 

upon the disposition of their country. 'Cretenses semper 

mendaces, malae bestiag, ventres pigri.' Sallust noteth that it is 

usual with kings to desire contradictories; ' Sed plerumque, 

regiae voluntates, ut vehementes sunt sic mobiles saepeque ipsse 

sibi adversse.' Tacitus observeth how rarely the raising of 

the fortune mendeth the disposition. ' Solus Vespasianus 

mutatus in melius.' Pindar maketh an observation that great 

and sudden fortune for the most part defeateth men. So the 

Psalm showeth it more easy to keep a measure in the enjoying 

of fortune, than in the increase of fortune; 'Divitise si affluant 

nolite cor apponere.' ' These observations, and the like,' — what 

book is it that has so many of ' the like '? — 'I deny not but 

are touched a little by Aristotle as in passage in his Rhetorics, 

and are handled in some scattered discourses/ One would think 

it was another philosopher, with pretensions not at all inferior, 

but professedly very much, and altogether superior to those of 

Aristotle, whose short-comings were under criticism here; 'but 

they (these observations) were never INCORPORATED into moral 

philosophy, to which they do essentially appertain, as THE 

KNOWLEDGE of THE DIVERSITY of GROUNDS and MOULDS 

doth to agriculture, and the knowledge of the diversity of 

COMPLEXIONS and CONSTITUTIONS doth to the physician; 



TP1E BACONIAN RHETORIC. 1 37 

except' — note it — 'except we mean to follow the indiscretion 
of empirics, which minister the same medicines to all patients. ,' 

Truly this does appear to give us some vistas of a science, 
and a ' pretty one/ for these particulars and illustrations are 
here, that we may see the better what it is, and whether it be 
extant. That is the question. And it happens singularly 
enough, to be a question just as pertinent now, as it was when 
the philosopher put it on his paper, two hundred and fifty 
years ago. 

There is the first point, then, in the table of this scientific 
history, with its subdivisions and articulations; and here is the 
second, not less essential. ' Another article of this knowledge 
is the inquiry touching the affections; for, as in medicin- 
ing the body,' — and it is a practical science we are on here ; it is 
the cure of the mind, and not a word for show, — ' as in medi- 
cining the body, it is in order, first, to know the divers com- 
plexions and constitutions; secondly, the diseases; and, lastly, 
the cures; so in medicining of the mind, — after knowledge of 
the divers characters of men's natures, it followeth, in order, to 
know the diseases and infirmities of the mind, which are no 
other than the perturbations and distempers of the affections.' 
And we shall find, under the head of the medicining of the 
body, some things on the subject of medicine in general, which 
could be better said there than here, because the wrath of pro- 
fessional dignitaries, — the eye of the ' basilisk/ was not perhaps 
quite so terrible in that quarter then, as it was in some others. 
For though ' the Doctors ' in that department, did manage, in 
the dark ages, to possess themselves of certain weapons of their 
own, which are said to have proved, on the whole, sufficiently 
formidable, they were not, as it happened, armed by the State 
as the others then were; and it was usually discretionary with 
the patient to avail himself, or not, of their drugs, and re- 
ceipts, and surgeries; whereas, in the diseased and suffering 
soul, no such discretion was tolerated. The drugs were in- 
deed compounded by the State in person, and the executive 
stood by, axe in hand, to see that they were taken, accompany- 
ing them with such other remedies as the case might seem to 



138 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

require ; the most serious operations being constantly per- 
formed without ever taking ' the sense ' of the patient. 

So we must not be surprised to find that this author who 
writes under such liabilities ' ventures to bring out the pith of 
his trunk of sciences, — that which sciences have in common, 
— the doctrine of the nature of things, — what he calls ' prima 
philosophia,' when his learned sock is on — a little more strongly 
and fully in that branch of it, with a glance this way, with a 
distinct intimation that it is common to the two, and applies 
here as well. There, too, he complains of the ignorance of 
anatomy, which is just the complaint he has been making here, 
and that, for want of it, ' they quarrel many times with the 
humours which are not in fault, the fault being in the very 
frame and mechanic of the part, which cannot be removed by 
medicine alterative, but must be accommodated and palliated by 
diet and medicines familiar? There, too, he reports the lack of 
medicinal history, and gives directions for supplying it, just 
such directions as he gives here, but that which makes the 
astounding difference in the reading of these reports to-day, is, 
that the one has been accepted, and the other has not ; nay, 
that the one has been read, and the other has not : for how else 
can we account for the fact, that men of learning, in our time, 
come out and tell us deliberately, not merely that this man's 
place in history, is the place of one who devoted his genius to 
the promotion of the personal convenience and bodily welfare 
of men, but, that it is the place of one who gave up the nobler 
nature, deliberately, on principle, and after examination and 
reflection, as a thing past help from science, as a thing lying 
out of the range of philosophy ? How else comes it, that the 
critic to-day tells us, dares to tell us, that this leader's word to 
the new ages of advancement is, that there is no scientific ad- 
vancement to be looked for here ? — how else could he tell us, 
with such vivid detail of illustration, that this innovator and 
proposer of advancement, never intended his Novum Organum 
to be applied to the cure of the moral diseases, to the subduing 
of the will and the affections, — but thought, because the 
old philosophy had failed, there was no use in trying the new; 



THE BACONIAN RHETORIC. 1 39 

— because the philosophy of words, and preconceptions, had 
failed, the philosophy of observation and application, the philo- 
sophy of ideas as they are in nature, and not as they are in the 
mind of man merely, the philosophy of laivs, must fail also ; — 
because argument had failed, art was hopeless ; — because 
syllogisms, based on popular, unscientific notions were of no 
effect, practical axioms based on the scientific knowledge of 
natural causes, and on their specific developments, were going 
to be of none effect also ? If the passages which are now under 
consideration, had been so much as read, how could a learned 
man, in our time, tell us that the author of the ' Advancement 
of Learning ' had come with any such despairful word as that 
to us, — to tell us that the new science he was introducing 
upon this Globe theatre, the science of laivs in nature, offered 
to Divinity and Morality no aid, — no ministry, no service 
in the cure of the mind ? And the reason why they have not 
been read, the reason why this part of the ' Advancement of 
Learning,' which is the principal part of it in the intention of 
its author, has been overlooked hitherto is, that the Art of 
Tradition, which is described, here — the art of the Tradition, 
and delivery of knowledges which are foreign from opinions 
received, was in the hand of its inventor, and able to fulfil his 
pleasure. 

After the knowledge of the divers characters of men's 
natures then, the next article of this inquiry is the diseases 
and infirmities of the MIND, which are no other than the 
perturbations and distempers of THE affections. For as 
the ancient politicians in popular estates were wont to compare 
the people to the sea, and the orators to the winds, because the 
sea would of itself be calm and quiet, if the winds did not move 
and trouble it ; so the people would be peaceable and tractable, if 
the seditious orators did not set them in working and agitation; so 
it may be fitly said, that the mind, in the nature thereof, would 
be temperate and stayed, if the affections, as winds, did not put 
it into tumult and perturbation. And here, again, I find, 
strange as before, that Aristotle should have written divers 
volumes of Ethics, and never handled the affections, 



140 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

which is the principal subject thereof; and yet, in his Rhetorics, 
where they are considered but collaterally, and in a second 
degree, as they may be moved by speech, he findeth place for 
them, and handleth them well for the quantity, but where their 
true place is, he pretermitted them. (Very much the method 
of procedure adopted by the philosopher who composes that 
criticism ; who also finds a place for the affections in passing, 
where they are considered collaterally, and in a second degree, 
and for the quantity, he handleth them well, and who knows 
how to bring his Rhetorics to bear on them, as well as the 
politicians in popular estates did of old, though for a different 
end; but where their true place is, he, too, pretermxtteih them; 
and, in his Novum Organum, he keeps so clear of them, and 
pretermits them so fully, that the critics tell us he never meant 
it should touch them.) ' For it is not his disputations about 
pleasure and pain that can satisfy this inquiry, no more than 
he that should generally handle the nature of light can be said 
to handle the nature of colours; for pleasure and pain are to 
the particular affections as light is to the particular colours/ 
Is not this a man for particulars, then ? And when he comes 
to the practical doctrine, — to the art — to the knowledge, 
which is power, — will he not have particulars here, as well as 
in those other arts which are based on them? Will he not 
have particulars here, as well as in chemistry and natural phi- 
losophy, and botany and mineralogy; or, when it comes to 
practice here, will he be content, after all, with the old line of 
argument, and elegant disquisition, with the old generalities 
and subtleties of definition, which required no collection of 
particulars, which were independent of observation, or for 
which the popular accidental observation sufficed ? ' Better 
travels, I suppose, had the Stoics taken in this argument, as far 
as I can gather by that which we have at secondhand. But yet 
it is like it was after their manner, rather in subtlety of defini- 
tions, which, in a subject of this nature, are but curiosities, than 
in active and ample descriptions and observations. 
So, likewise, I find some particular writings of an elegant nature, 
touching some of the affections; as of anger, of comfort upon 



THE BACONIAN RHETORIC. 141 

adverse accidents, of tenderness of countenance, and. others.' 
And such writings were not confined to the ancients. Some 
of us have seen elegant writings of this nature, published 
under the name of the philosopher who composes this criticism, 
and suggests the possibility of essays of a more lively and ex- 
perimental kind, and who seems to think that the treatment 
should be ample, as well as active. 

' But the Poets and Writers of History are the best 
Doctors of this knowledge, where we may find, painted forth 
with great life, how affections are kindled and incited, and how 
pacified and refrained;' — certainly, that is the kind of learning 
we want here: — 'and how, again, contained from act and 
further degree' — very useful knowledge, one would say, and it 
is a pity it should not be ' diffused,' but it is not every poet 
who can be said to have it ; — e how they disclose themselves — 
how they work — how they vary;' — this is the science of them 
clearly, whoever has it; — how they gather and fortify — how 
they are enwrapped one within another; — yes, there is one Poet, 
one Doctor of this science, in whom we can find that also; — 
' and how they do fight and encounter one with another, and 
other like particularities' We all know what Poet it is, to 
whose lively and ample descriptions of the affections and 
passions — to whose particularities — that description best ap- 
plies, and in what age of the world he lived ; but no one, who 
has not first studied them as scientific exhibitions, can begin 
to perceive the force — the exclusive force — of the reference. 
' Amongst the which, this last is of special use in moral and 
civil matters: how, I say, to set affection against affection, aud 
to master one by another, even as we used to hunt beast with 
beast, and fly bird with bird, which otherwise, percase, we 
could not so easily recover.' The Poet has not only exhibited 
this with very voluminous and lively details, but he, too, has 
concluded his precept ; — 

' One fire burns out another's burning ' — 
' One desperate grief cures with, another's languish ' — 
' Take thou some new infection to thine eye, 
And the rank poison of the old will die.' 

Romeo and Juliet 



142 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

' As fire drives out fire, so pity, pity ; 
And pity to the general wrong of Rome 
Hath done this deed on Ccesar.' 

Julius Ccesar. 

for it is the larger form, which is the worthier, in that new 
department of mixed mathematics which this philosopher was 
cultivating. 

1 One fire drives out one fire, one nail one nail : 
Eights by rights fouler, strength by strengths do fail.' 

Coriolanus. 

And for history of cases, see the same author in Hamlet and 
other plays."* 

* This philosopher's prose not unfrequently contains the key of the 
poetic paraphrase ; and the true reading of the fine, which has occa- 
sioned so much perplexity to the critics, may, perhaps, be suggested by 
this connection — 'to set affection against affection, and to master one 
by another, even as we hunt beast with beast, and fly bird with bird.' 



THE BACONIAN RHETORIC. 143 



CHAPTER V. 

ALTERATION. 

Hast thou not learn'd me how 
To make perfumes ? distil ? preserve ? yea, so, 
That our great king himself doth woo me oft 
For my confections ? Having thus far proceeded, 
(Unless thou think'st me devilish,) is't not meet 
That I did amplify my judgment in 
Other conclusions ? Cymbeline. 

npHUS far, it is the science of Man, as he is, that is pro- 
-*• pounded. It is a scientific history of the Mind and its 
diseases, built up from particulars, as other scientific histories 
are; and having disposed, in this general manner, of that 
which must be dealt with by way of application, those points 
of nature and fortune, which he puts down as the basis and 
conditions to which all our WORK is limited and tied, we come 
now to that which IS within our power — to those points which 
we can deal with by way of alteration, and not of appli- 
cation merely; and yet points which are operating perpetually 
on the human character, changing the will and appetite, and 
altering* the conduct, by laws not less sure than those which 
operate in the occult processes of nature, and determine dif- 
ferences behind the scene, or out of the range of our volition. 

And if after having duly weighed the hints we have already 
received of the importance of the subject, we do not any 
longer suffer ourselves to be put off the track, or bewildered by 
the first rhetorical effect of the sentence in which these agencies 
are introduced to our attention, — if we look at that rapid series 
of words, as something else than the points of a period, if we 
stop long enough to recover from the confusion which a mere 
string of names, a catalogue or table of contents, crowded into 
a single sentence, will, of necessity, create, — if we stop long 
enough to see that each one of these words is a point in the 
table of a new science, we shall perceive at once, that after 



144 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OP TRADITION. 

having made all this large allowance, this new allowance for 
that which is without our power, there is still a very, very large 
margin of operation, and discovery, and experiment left; that 
there is still a large scope of alteration left — alteration in man 
as he is. For we shall find that these forces which are within our 
power, are the very ones which are making, and always have been 
making, man what he is. Running our eye along this table of 
forces and supplies, with that understanding of its uses, we 
shall perceive at once, that we have the most ample material 
here, if it were but scientifically handled ; untried, inexhaustible 
means and appliances for raising man to the height of his 
pattern and original, to the stature of a perfect man. 

It is not the material of this regimen of growth and 
advancement, it is not the Materia Medica that is wanting, — 
it is the science of it. It is the natural history of these forces, 
with the precepts scientifically concluded on them, that is 
wanting. The appliances are here; the scientific application 
of them remains to be made, and until these have been tried, 
it is too early to pronounce on the case; until these have been 
tried, just as other precepts of the new science have been, 
it is too soon to say that that science of nature, — that know- 
ledge of laws — that foreknowledge of effects, which operates so 
remedially in all other departments of the human, life, is 
without application, is of no efficiency here; until these have 
been tried it is too soon to say that the science of nature is not 
what the man who brought it in on this Globe theatre declared 
it to be, the handmaid of Divinity, the intelligent handmaid and 
minister of religion, to whose discretion in the economy of 
Providence, much, much has evidently been left. 

And it was no assumption in this man to claim, as he did 
claim, a divine and providential authority for this procedure. 
And those who intelligently fulfil their parts in this great en- 
terprise for man's relief, and the Creator's glory, have just as 
clear a right to say, as those of old who fulfilled with such 
means and lights, and inspirations as their time gave them, 
their part in the plan of the human advancement, • it is God 
who worketh in us.' 



THE BACONIAN RHETORIC. 145 

' Now come we to those points which are within our com- 
mand, and have force and operation upon the mind, to affect 
the will and appetite, and to alter manners: wherein they 
ought to have handled custom, exercise, habit, edu- 
cation, EXAMPLE, IMITATION, EMULATION, COMPANY, 
FRIENDS, PRAISE, REPROOF, EXHORTATION, FAME, LAWS, 

BOOKS, studies: these, as they have determinate use in 
moralities, from these the mind SUFFERETH ; and of these are 
such receipts and regiments compounded and described, as 
may serve to recover or preserve the health and good estate of 
the mind, as far as pertaineth to human medicine; of which 
number we will insist upon some one* or two, as an example of 
the rest, because it were too long to prosecute all! But the 
careful reader perceives in that which follows, that the treat- 
ment of this so vital subject, though all that the author has to 
say upon it here, is condensed into these brief paragraphs, is 
not by any means so miscellaneous, as this introduction and 
'the first cogitation' on it, might, perhaps, have prepared him 
to find it. 

To be permitted to handle these forces openly, in the form 
of literary report, and recommendation, would, no doubt, have 
seemed to this inventor of sciences, in his day no small 
privilege. But there was another kind of experiment in them 
which he aspired to. He wished to take these forces in hand 
more directly, and compound recipes, with them, and other 
' regiments ' and cures. For by nature and carefullest study 
he was a Doctor in this degree and kind — and a man thus 
fitted, inevitably seeks his sphere. \Very unlearned in this 
science of human nature which he has left us, — much wanting 
in analysis must he be, who can find in the persistent determi- 
nation of such a man to possess himself of places of trust and 
authority, only the vulgar desire for courtly distinction, and 
eagerness for the paraphernalia of office. This man was not 
wanting in any of the common natural sentiments; the private 
and particular nature was large in him, and that good to which 
he gives the preference in his comparison of those exclusive 
aims and enjoyments, is ' the good which is active, and not that 

L 



146 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

which is passive 1 ; both as it tends to secure that individual 
perpetuity which is the especial craving of men thus specially 
endowed, and on account of ' that affection for variety and pro- 
ceeding ' which is also common to men, and specially developed 
in such men, — an affection which the goods of the passive 
nature are not able to satisfy. ' But in enterprises, pursuits and 
purposes of life, there is much variety whereof men are sensi- 
ble with pleasure in their inceptions, progressions, recoils, 
re-integration, approaches and attainings to their ends.' And he 
gives us a long insight into his own particular nature and history 
in that sentence. He is careful to distinguish this kind of 
good from the good of society, ' though in some cases it hath 
an incident to it. For that gigantine state of mind which 
possesseth the troublers of the world, such as was Lucius Sylla, 
and infinite other in smaller model, who would have all men 
happy or unhappy, as they were their friends or enemies, and 
would give form to the world according to their oivn humours, 
which is the true theomachy, pretendeth and aspireth to active 
good though it recedeth farthest from that good of society, which 
we have determined to be the greater? 

In no troubler or benefactor of the world, on the largest 
scale, in no theomachist of any age, whether intelligent and 
benevolent, or demoniacal and evil, had this nature which he 
here defines so clearly, ever been more largely incorporated, 
or more effectively armed. But in him this tendency to per- 
sonal aggrandisement was overlooked, and subordinated by the 
larger nature, — by the intelligence which includes the whole, 
and is able to weigh the part with it, and by the sentiments 
which enforce or anticipate intelligent decision. 

Both these facts must be taken into the account, if we would 
read his history fairly. For he composed for himself a plan of 
living, in which this naturally intense desire for an individual 
perpetuity and renown, and this love of action and enterprise 
for its own sake, was sternly subordinated to the noblest ends 
of living, to the largest good of his kind, to the divine and 
eternal law of duty, to the relief of man's estate and the 
Creator's glory. And without making any claim on his 



THE BACONIAN RHETORIC. 147 

behalf, which it would be unworthy to make for one to whom 
the truth was dearer than the opinions of men ; it may be 
asserted, that whatever errors of judgment or passion, we may 
find, or think we find in him, these ends were with him pre- 
dominant, and shaped his course. 

He was not naturally a man of letters, but a man of action, 
intensely impelled to action, and it was because he was for- 
bidden to fulfil his enterprise in person, because he had to 
write letters of direction to those to whom he was compelled 
to entrust it, because he had to write letters to the future, and 
leave himself and his will in letters, that letters became, in his 
hands, practical. He, too, knew what it was to be compelled 
' to unpack his heart in words ' when deeds should have ex- 
pressed it. 

But even words are forbidden him here. After all the pains 
he has taken to show us what the deficiency is which he is 
reporting here, and what the art and science which he is pro- 
posing, he can only put down a few paragraphs on the subject, 
casually, as it were, in passing. Of all these forces which have 
operation on the mind, and with which scientific appliances 
for the human mind should be compounded, he can only ( insist 
upon some one or two as an example of the rest.' 

That was all that a writer, who was at the same time a 
public man, could venture on, — a writer who had once been 
under violent political suspicion, and was still eagerly watched, 
and especially by one class of public functionaries, who seemed 
to feel, that with all his deference to their claims, there was 
something there not quite friendly to them, this was all that 
he could undertake to insist upon ' in that place.' But a 
writer who had the advantage of being already defunct — a 
writer whose estate on the earth was then already done, and 
who was in no kind of danger of losing either his head or his 
place, could of course manage this part of the subject differ- 
ently. He would not find it too long to prosecute all, perhaps. 
And if he had at the same time the advantage of a foreign 
name and seignorie, he could come out in England at this very 
crisis with the freest exhibitions of the points which are here 

l2 



I48 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

only indicated. He could even put them down openly in his 
table of contents, every one of them, and make them the titles 
of his chapters. 

There was a work published in England, in that age, in 
which these forces, of which only the catalogue is inserted here, 
these forces which are in our power, which we can alter, forces 
from which the mind suffereth, which have operation upon the 
mind to affect the will and appetite, are directly dealt with in 
the most subtle and artistic manner, in the form of literary 
essay; and in the bolder chapters, the author's observations and 
criticisms are clearly put down ; his scientific suggestions of 
alterations and new compounds, his scientific doctrine of care- 
ful alterations, his scientific doctrine of surgery, and adaptation 
of regimen, and cure to different ages, and differing social con- 
ditions, are all promiscuously filed in, and the English public 
swallows it without any difficulty at all, and perceives nothing 
disagreeable or dangerous in it. 

This work contains, also, some of those other parts of the 
new science which have just been reported as wanting, parts 
which are said by the inventor of this science, to have a great 
ministry and suppeditation to policy, as well as morality, and 
the natural history of the creature, which it is here proposed 
to reform, is brought out without any regard whatever to con- 
siderations which would inevitably affect a moralist, looking at 
the subject from any less earnest and practical — from any less 
elevated point of view. 

Of course, it was perfectly competent for a Gascon whose 
gasconading was understood to be without any motive beyond 
that of vanity and egotism, and without any incidence to effects, 
to say, in the way of mere foolery, many things which an 
English statesman could not then so well endorse. And in 
case his personality were called in question, there was the 
mountain to retreat to, and the saint of the mount, in whose 
behalf the goose is annually sacrificed by the English people, 
the saint under whose shield and name the great English phi- 
losopher sleeps. In fact, this personage is not so limited in his 
quarters as the proper name might seem to imply. One does 



THE BACOM^SN RHETORIC. 149 

not have to go to the south of France to find him. But it is 
certainly remarkable, that a work in Natural History, com- 
posed by the inventors of the science of observation, and the 
first in the field, containing their observations in that part of 
the field too, in which the deficiency appeared to them most 
important, should have been able to pass so long under so thin 
a disguise, under this merest gauze of egotism, unchallenged. 

These essaies, however, have not been without result. They 
have been operating incessantly, ever since, directly upon the 
leading minds, and indirectly upon the minds of men in gene- 
ral, (for many who had never read the book, have all their 
lives felt its influence), and tending gradually to the clearing 
up of the human intelligence in ' the practice part of life ' in 
general, and to the development of a common sense on the 
topics here handled, much more creditable to the species than 
anything that the author could find stirring in his age. When 
the works which the propounders of the Great Instauration 
took pains to get composed by way of filling up their plan of 
it, a little, come to be collected and bound, this one will have 
to find its place among them. 

But here, at home, in his own historical name and figure, in 
his own person, instead of conducting his magnificent scientific 
experiments on that scale which the genius of his activity, and 
the largeness of his good will, would have prescribed to him, 
instead of founding his House of Solomon as he would have 
founded it, (as that proximity to the throne, when it was the 
throne of an absolute monarch might have enabled him to 
found it, if the monarch he found there had been, indeed, 
what he claimed to be, a lover of learning,) instead of such 
large help and countenance as that of the king, to whom this 
great proposition was addressed, the philosopher of that time 
could not even venture on a literary essay in this field under 
that protection; it was as much as he could do, it was as much 
as his favor with the king was worth, to slip in here, in this 
conspicuous place, where it would be sure to be found, sooner 
or later, the index of his essaies. 

'It would be too long, 1 he says, 'to inquire here into the 



15° THE ELIZABETHAN* ART OF TRADITION. 

operation of all these social forces that are making men, that 
are doing more to make them what they are, than nature her- 
self is doing,' for, ' know thou/ the Poet of this Philosophy says, 
' know thou MEN ARE as the time is.' He has included here, 
in these points which he would have scientifically handled, that 
which makes times, that which can be altered, that which Ad- 
vancements of Learning, however, set on foot at first, are sure 
in the end to alter. ' We will insist upon some one or two as 
an example of the rest.' And we find that the points he resumes 
to speak of here, are, indeed, points of primary consequence; 
social forces that do indeed need a scientific control, effects re- 
ported, and precepts concluded. Custom and Habit, Books and 
Studies, and then a kind of culture, which he says, 'seemeth 
to be more accurate and elaborate than the rest,' which we 
find, upon examination, to be a strictly religious culture, and 
lastly the method to which he gives the preference, as the most 
compendious and summary in its formative or reforming influ- 
ence, e the electing and propounding unto a man's self good and 
virtuous ends of his life, such as may be in a reasonable sort 
within his compass to attain.' He says enough under these 
heads to show the difficulty of writing on a subject where the 
science has been reported wanting, while the ' Art and Practice' 
is prescribed. 

He lays much stress on CUSTOM and habit, and gives some 
few precepts for its management, ' made out of the pith and 
heart of sciences,' but he speaks briefly, and chiefly for the 
purpose of indicating the value he attaches to this point, for he 
concludes his precepts and observations on it, thus. ' Many 
other axioms there are, touching the managing of exercise and 
custom, which being so conducted, — scientifically conducted — 
do prove, indeed another nature [' almost, can change the 
stamp of nature,' — is Hamlets word on this point] ; but being 
governed by chance, doth commonly prove but AN ape of 
nature, and bringeth forth that which is lame and counterfeit* 
For not less than that is the difference between the scientific 
administration of these things, from which the mind suffereth, 
and the blind, hap-hazard one. 



THE BACONIAN RHETORIC. 151 

But in proceeding to the next point on which he ventures 
to offer some suggestions, that of BOOKS and studies, we 
shall do well to take with us that general doctrine of cure, 
founded upon the nature of things, which he produces under 
the head of the cure of the body, with a distinct allusion to 
its proper application here. And it is well to observe how 
exactly the tone of the criticism in this department, chimes in 
with that of the criticism already reported here. ' In the con- 
sideration of the cures of diseases, I find a deficiency in the 
receipts of propriety respecting the particular cures of diseases ; 
for the physicians have frustrated the fruit of tradition, and 
eocpei^ience, by their magistralities in adding and taking out, and 
changing quid pro quo in their receipts at their pleasure, 
commanding SO OVER the medicine, as the medicine 
cannot command over the disease? that is a piece of criticism 
which appears to belong to the general subject of cure; and 
here is one which he himself stops to apply to a different 
branch of it. 

'But, lest I grow more particular than is agreeable, either to 
my intention ox proportion, I will conclude this part with the 
note of one deficiency more, which seemeth to me of greatest 
consequence, which is, that the prescripts in use are too com- 
pendious to attain their end; for, to my understanding, 
it is a vain and flattering opinion to think any medicine can be 
so sovereign, or so happy, as that the receipt or use of it can 
work any great effect upon the body of man : it were a strange 
speech, which spoken, or spoken oft, should reclaim a man from 
a vice to which he were by nature subject; it is order, pursuit, 
sequence, and interchange of application which is mighty in 
nature,' (and it is power we are inquiring for here) ' which, 
although it requires more exact knowledge in prescribing, and 
more precise obedience in observing, yet it is recompensed with 
the magnitude of effects.' 

Possessed now of his general theory of cure, we shall better 
understand his particular suggestions in regard to these medi- 
cines and alteratives of the mind and manners, which are here 
under consideration. 



152 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

' So if we should handle books and studies/ he con- 
tinues, having handled custom and habit a little and their 
powers, in that profoundly suggestive manner, ' so if we should 
handle books and studies, and what influence and operation 
they have upon manners, are there not divers precepts of 
great caution and direction f ' A question to be asked. And 
he goes on to make some further enquiries and suggestions 
which have considerably more in them than meets the ear 
They appear to involve the intimation that many of our books 
on moral philosophy, come to us from the youthful and poetic 
ages of the world, ages in which sentiment and spontaneous 
conviction supplied the place of learning; for the accumula- 
tions of ages of experiment and conclusion, tend to maturity 
and sobriety of judgment in the race, as do the corresponding 
accumulations in the individual experience and memory. 
'And the reason why books' (which are adapted to the popular 
belief in these early and unlearned ages) 'are of so little effect 
towards honesty of life, is that they are not read and re- 
volved — revolved — as they should be, by men in mature years' 
But unlearned people are always beginners. And it is dan- 
gerous to put them upon the task, or to leave them to the task 
of remodelling their beliefs and adapting them to the ad- 
vancing stages of human development. He, too, thinks it 
is easier to overthrow the old opinions, than it is to dis- 
criminate that which is to be conserved in them. The hints 
here are of the most profoundly cautious kind — as they have 
need to be — but they point to the danger which attends 
the advancement of learning when rashly and unwisely con- 
ducted, and the danger of introducing opinions which are in 
advance of the popular culture ; dangers of which the history 
of former times furnished eminent examples and warnings 
then; warnings which have since been repeated in modern 
instances. He proposes that books shall be tried by their 
effects on manners. If they fail to produce HONESTY OF LIFE, 
and if certain particular forms of truth which were once effec- 
tive to that end, in the course of a popular advancement, or 
change of any kind, have lost that virtue, let them be ex- 



THE BACONIAN RHETORIC. 153 

amined; let the translation of them be scientifically accom- 
plished, so that the main truth be not lost in the process, so 
that men be not compelled by fearful experience to retrace 
their steps in search of it, even, perhaps, to the resuming of 
the old, dead form again, with all its cumbrous in efficacies ; 
for the lack of a leadership which should have been able 
to discriminate for them, and forestall this empirical pro- 
cedure. 

Speaking of books of Moral science in general, and their 
adaptation to different ages, he says — ' Did not one of the 
fathers, in great indignation, call POESY ' vinum demonum] 
because it increaseth temptations, perturbations, and vain 
opinions'? Is not the opinion of Aristotle worthy to be re- 
garded, wherein he saith, ' That young men are no fit auditors 
of moral philosophy,' because they are not settled from the 
boiling heat of their affections, nor attempered with time and 
experience'^ [And our Poet, we may remark in passing, 
seems to have been struck with that same observation; for by 
a happy coincidence, he appears to have it in his commonplace 
book too, and he has not only made a note of it, as this one 
has, but has taken the trouble to translate it into verse. He 
does, indeed, go a little out of his way in time, to introduce 
it; but he is a poet who is fond of an anachronism, when it 
happens to serve his purpose — 

'Paris and Troilus, you have both said well ; 
And on the cause and question now in hand 
Have glozed ; but, superficially, not much 
Unlike young men whom Aristotle thought 
Unfit to hear moral philosophy!] 

The question is, then, as to the adaptations of forms, of 
moral instruction to different ages of the human development. 
For when a decided want of ' honesty of life ' shows itself, in any 
very general manner, under the fullest operation of any given 
doctrine which is the received one, it is time for men of learn- 
ing to begin to look about them a little; and it is a time when 
directions so cautious as these should not by any means be 



154 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

despised by those on whom the responsibility of direction, 
here, is in any way devolved. 

1 And doth it not hereof come, that those excellent books 
and discourses of the ancient writers, whereby they have per- 
suaded unto virtue most effectually, by representing her in state 
and majesty, and popular opinions against virtue in their 
parasites' coats, fit to be scorned and derided, are of so little 
effect towards honesty of life — 

[Polonius. — Honest, my lord % 
Hamlet. — Ay, honest.] 

— because they are not read and revolved by men, in their ma- 
ture and settled years, but confined almost to boys and beginners ? 
But is it not true, also, that much less young men are fit 
auditors of matters of policy till they have been thoroughly 
seasoned in religion and morality, lest their judgments be cor- 
rupted, and made apt to think that there are no true differ- 
ences of things, but according to utility and fortune.' 

By putting in here two or three of those ' elegant sentences ' 
which the author has taken out from their connections in his 
discourses, and strung together, by way of making more per- 
ceptible points and stronger impressions with them, according 
to that theory of his in regard to aphorisms already quoted, 
we shall better understand this passage, for the connection in 
which it is introduced here tends somewhat to involve and 
obscure the meaning. ' In removing superstitions,' he tells us, 
then, in this so pointed manner, ' care should be had the good 
be not taken away with the bad, which commonly is done 
when the people is the physician. 1 ' Things will have, their first 
or second agitation.' [Prima Philosophia — pith and heart of 
sciences: the author of this aphorism is sound and grounded.] 
' If they be not tossed on the waves of counsel, they will be 
tossed on the waves of fortune. 1 That last ' tossing ' requires a 
second cogitation. There might have been a more direct way 
of expressing it; but this author prefers similes in such cases, 
he tells us. But here is more on the same subject. ' It were 
good that men in their renovations follow the example of 



THE BACONIAN EHETORIC. 155 

time itself, which, indeed, innovateth greatly, but quietly, and 
by degrees scarce to be perceived ;' and ' Discretion in speech 
is more than eloquence.' These are the sentiments and 
opinions of that man of science, whose works we are now 
opening, not caring under what particular name or form we 
may find them. One or two of these observations do not 
sound at all like prescience now; but at the time when they 
were given out as precepts of direction, it required that ac- 
quaintance with the nature of things in general which is 
derived from a large and studious observation of particulars, to 
put them into a form so oracular. 

But this general suggestion with regard to our books of 
moral philosophy, and their adaptation to the largest effect on 
the will and appetite under the given conditions of time — 
conditions which involve the instruction of masses of men, in 
whom affection predominates — men in whom judgment is not 
yet matured — men not attempered with the time and experi- 
ence of ages, by means of those preservations of it which the 
traditions of learning make; beside this general suggestion in 
regard to these so potent instrumentalities in manners, he has 
another to make, one in which this general proposition to sub- 
stitute learning for preconception in practical matters, — at least, 
as far as may be, comes out again in the form of criticism, and 
of a most specially significant kind. It is a point which he 
touches lightly here; but one which he touches again and 
again in other parts of this work, and one which he resumes 
at large in his practical ethics. 

' Again, is there not a caution likewise to be given of the 
doctrines of moralities themselves, some kinds of them, lest 
they make men too precise, arrogant, incompatible, as Cicero 
saith of Cato, in Marco Catone: f Hsec bona quaa videmus 
divina et egregia ipsius scitote esse propria: quaa nonnunquam 
requirimus, ea sunt omnia non a natura, sed a magistro?' 

And after glancing at the specific subject of remedial agen- 
cies which are within the scope of our revision and renovation, 
under some other heads, concluding with that which is of all 
others the most compendious and summary, and again the 



156 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

most noble and effectual to the reducing of the mind unto 
virtue and good estate, he concludes this whole part, this part 
in which the points and outlines of the new science — that 
radical human science which he has dared to report deficient, 
come out with such masterly grasp and precision, — he con- 
cludes this whole part in the. words which follow, — words 
which it will take the author's own doctrine of interpretation 
to open. For this is one of those passages which he com- 
mends to the second cogitation of the reader, and he knew 
if 'the times that were nearer' were not able to read it, 'the 
times that were farther off' would find it clear enough. 

' Therefore I do conclude this part of Moral Knowledge 
concerning the culture and regiment of the Mind; wherein 
if any man, considering the facts thereof which I have enumerated, 
do judge that my labour is to collect into an art OR 
science, that which hath been pretermitted by others, as mat- 
ters of common sense and experience, he jiidgeth well.' The 
practised eye will detect on the surface here, some marks of 
that style which this author recommends in such cases: es- 
pecially where such strong pre-occupations exist; already we 
perceive that this is one of those sentences which is addressed 
to the skill of the interpreter; in which, by means of a careful 
selection and collocation of words, two or more meanings are 
conveyed under one form of expression. And it may not be 
amiss to remember here, that this is a style, according to the 
author's own description of it elsewhere, in which the more 
involved and enigmatical passages sometimes admit of several 
readings, each having its own pertinence and value, according 
to the mental condition of the reader; and that it is a style 
in which even the delicate, collateral sounds, that are distinctly 
included in this art of tradition, must come in sometimes in 
the more critical places, in aid of the interpretation. 'But 
what if it be an harangue whereon his life depends?' 

1. — If any man considering the parts thereof, which I have 
enumerated, do judge that my labour is to collect into an 
art or science that which hath been preter-mitted by 
others, he judgeth well. 



THE BACONIAN RHETORIC. 157 

2. — If any man do judge that my labour is to collect into an 
art or science that which hath been pretermitted by others 

AS MATTERS OF COMMON SENSE and EXPERIENCE, he 

judgeth well. 

3. — If any man considering the parts thereof which I 
have enumerated, do judge that my labor is to collect 
into an art or science, that which hath been pretermitted 
by others, as matters of common sense and experience, he 
judgeth well. 

But if there be any doubt, about the more critical of these 
meanings, let us read on, and we shall find the criticism of 
this great and greatest proposition, the proposition to substi- 
tute learning for preconception, in the main department of 
human practice, brought out with all the emphasis and signi- 
ficance which becomes the close of so great a period in 
sciences, and not without a little flowering of that rhetoric, 
in which beauty is the incident, and discretion is more than 
eloquence. 

' But as Philocrates sported with Demosthenes you may 
not marvel, Athenians, that Demosthenes and I do differ, for 
he drinketh water, and i" drink wine. And like as we read 
of an ancient parable of the two gates of sleep — 

Sunt gemmae somni portge, quarum altera fertur 
Cornea, qua veris facilis datur exitus umbris : 
Altera candenti perfecta nitens elephanto, 
Sed falsa ad caelum mittunt insomnia manes. 

So if we put on sobriety and attention we shall find it a 
sure maxim in knowledge, that the more pleasant liquor of wine 
is the more vaporous, and the braver gate of ivory sendeth forth 
the falser dreams.' 



158 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 



CHAPTER VI. 

It is a basilisk unto mine eyes, — 

Kills me to look on't, 

* * * 

This fierce abridgment 

Hath to it circumstantial branches, which 

Distinction should be rich in. 

Cymbeline. 

^PHIS whole subject is introduced here in its natural and 
inevitable connection with that special form of Delivery 
and Tradition which it required. For we find that connection 
indicated here, where the matter of the tradition, and that 
part of it which specially requires this form is treated, and we 
find the form itself specified here incidentally, but not less 
unmistakeably, that it is in that part of the work where the 
Art of Tradition is the primary subject. In bestowing on 
' the parts ' of this science, which the propounder of it is here 
enumerating — that consideration which the concluding pa- 
ragraph invites to them, we find, not only the fields clearly 
marked out, in which he is labouring to collect into an art 
and science, that which has hitherto been conducted without 
art or science, and left to common sense and experience, the 
fields in which these goodly observations grow, of which men 
have hitherto been content to gather a poesy to carry in their 
hands, — (observations which he will bring home to his con- 
fectionery, in such new and amazing prodigality and selection), 
but we find also the very form which these new collections, 
with the new precepts concluded on them, would naturally 
take, and that it is one in which these new parts of the new 
science and its art, which he is labouring to constitute, mio-ht 
very well come out, at such a time, without being recognised 
as philosophy at all, — might even be brought out by other 
men without science, as matters of common sense and expe- 
rience; though the world would have to concede, and the 



THE BACONIAN EHETORIC. 159 

longer the study went on, the more it would be inclined to 
concede, that the common sense and experience was upon the 
whole somewhat uncommon, and some who perceived its 
reaches, without finding that it was art or science, would even 
be inclined to call it preternatural. 

And when he tells us, that the first step in the New Science 
is the dissection of character, and the production and exhibition 
of certain scientifically constructed portraits, by means of 
which this may be effected, portraits which shall represent 
in their type-form by means of ' illustrious instances/ the seve- 
ral characters and tempers of men's natures and dispositions 
1 that the secret disposition of each particular man may be laid 
open, and from a knowledge of the whole, the precepts concern- 
ing the cures of the mind may be more rightly concluded,' — 
surely here, to a man of learning, the form, — the form in 
which these artistically composed diagrams will be found, is 
not doubtfully indicated. 

And when, at the next step, we come to the history of ( the 
affections,' and are told distinctly that here philosophy, the 
philosophy of practice, must needs descend from the abstrac- 
tion, and generalities of the ancient morality, for those obser- 
vations and experiments which it is the legitimate business of 
the poet to conduct, though the poet, in conducting these ob- 
servations and experiments, has hitherto been wanting in the 
rigor which science requires, when we are told that philosophy 
must inevitably enter here, that department of learning, of 
which the true poet is ' the doctor,' — surely here at least, we 
know where we are. Certainly it is not the fault of the author 
of the Great Instauration if we do not know what department 
of learning the collections of the new learning which he claims 
to have made will be found in — if found at all, must be found 
in. It is not his fault if we do not know in what department 
to look for the applications of the Novum Organum to those 
' noblest subjects' on which he preferred to try its powers, he 
tells us. Here at least — the Index to these missing books — is 
clear enough. 

But in his treatment of Poetry, as one of the three grand 



l6o THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

departments of Human Learning, for not less noble than that, 
is the place he openly assigns to it, though that open and 
primary treatment of it, is superficially brief, he contrives to 
insert in it, his deliberate, scientific preference of it, as a means 
of effective scientific exhibition, to either of the two graver 
parts, which he has associated with it — to history on the one 
hand, as corresponding to the faculty of memory, and to phi- 
losophy or mere abstract statement on the other, as correspond- 
ing to the faculty of Reason; for it is that great radical de- 
partment of learning, which is referred to the Imagination, that 
constitutes in this distribution of learning the third grand divi- 
sion of it. He shows us here, in a few words, under different 
points and heads, what masterly facilities, what indispensable, 
incomparable powers it has for that purpose. There is a form of 
it, 'which is as A visible history, and is an image of actions 
as if they ivere present, as history is, of actions that are past.' 
There is a form of it which is applied only to express some 
special purpose or conceit, which was used of old by philoso- 
phers to express any point of reason more sharp and subtle 
than the vulgar, and, nevertheless, now and at all times these 
allusive parabolical poems do retain much life and vigour 
because' — note it, — note that because, — that two-fold because, 
because reason cannot be so sensible, nor examples so 
fit. And he adds, also, ' there remains another use of this 
poesy, opposite to the one j ust mentioned, for that use tendeth 
to demonstrate and illustrate that which is taught or delivered ; 
and this other to retire and obscure it : that is, when the 
secrets and mysteries of religion, policy or philosophy are involved 
in fables and parables.' 

But under the cover of] introducing the ' Wisdom of the 
Ancients/ and the form in which that was conveyed, he ex- 
plains more at large the conditions which this kind of exhi- 
bition best meets ; he claims it as a proper form of learning, and 
tells us outright, that the New Science must be conveyed in it. 
He has left us here, all prepared to our hands, precisely the 
argument which the subject now under consideration requires. 

1 Upon deliberate consideration, my judgment is, that a 



THE BACONIAN RHETOEIC. l6l 

concealed instruction and allegory, was originally intended in 
many of the ancient fables ; observing tliat some fables discover a 
great and evident similitude, relation, and connection with the 
things they signify, as well in the structure of the fable, as in the 
propriety of the names whereby the persons or actors are charac- 
terised, insomuch that no one could positively deny a sense and 
meaning to be from the first intended and purposely shadowed 
out in them ' ; and he mentions some instances of this kind ; 
and the first is a very explanatory one, tending to throw light 
upon the proceedings of men whose rebellions, so far as politi- 
cal action is concerned, have been successfully repressed. And 
he takes occasion to introduce this particular fable repeatedly 
in similar connections. ' For who can hear that Fame, after 
the giants were destroyed, sprung up as their posthumous sister, 
and not apply it to the clamour of parties, and the seditious 
rumours which commonly fly about upon the quelling of in- 
surrections. Or who, upon hearing that memorable expedition 
of the gods against the giants, when the braying of Silenus 1 
ass greatly contributed in putting the giants to flight, does not 
clearly conceive that this directly points to the monstrous enter- 
prises of rebellious subjects, which are frequently disappointed 
and frustrated by vain fears and empty rumours. Nor is it won- 
der if sometimes a piece of history or other things are intro- 
duced by way of ornament, or if the times of the action are 
confounded, [the very likeliest thing in the world to happen ; 
things are often 'forced in time 1 as he has given us to under- 
stand in complimenting a king's book where the person was 
absent but not the occasion], or if part of one fable be tacked 
to another, for all this must necessarily happen, as the fables 
were the invention of men who lived in different ages, and had 
different views, some of them being ancient, others more mo- 
dern, some having an eye to natural philosophy, others to 
morality and civil policy.' 

This appears to be just the kind of criticism we happen to 
be in need of in conducting our present inquiry, and the pas- 
sage which follows is not less to the purpose. 

For, having given some other reasons for this opinion he 

M 



1 62 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OP TRADITION. 

has expressed in regard to the concealed doctrine of the an- 
cients, he concludes in this manner: 'But if any one shall, 
notwithstanding this, contend that allegories are always adven- 
titious, and no way native or genuinely contained in them, we 
might here leave him undisturbed in the gravity of that judgment, 
though we cannot but think it somewhat dull and phlegmatic, 
and, if it were worth the trouble, proceed to another kind of 
argument.' And, apparently, the argument he proceeds to, is 
worth some trouble, since he takes pains to bring it out so 
cautiously, under so many different heads, with such iteration 
and fulness, taking care to insert it so many times in his work 
on the Advancement of Learning, and here producing it again 
in his Introduction to the Wisdom of the Ancients, accom- 
panied with a distinct assurance that it is not the wisdom of the 
ancients he is concerning himself about, and their necessities 
and helps and instruments; though if any one persists in think- 
ing that it is, he is not disposed to disturb him in the gravity 
of that judgment. He honestly thinks that they had indeed 
such intentions as those that he describes; but that is a ques- 
tion for the curious, and he has other work on hand; he 
happens to be one, whose views of learning and its uses, do 
not keep him long on questions of mere curiosity. It is with 
the Moderns, and not with the Ancients that he has to deal; 
it is the present and the future, and not the past that he 
'breaks his sleeps' for. Whether the Ancients used those fables 
for purposes of innovation, and gradual encroachment on error 
or not, here is a Modern, he tells us, who for one, cannot 
dispense with them in his teaching. 

For having disposed of his $Tflwr readers — those of the dull and 
phlegmatic kind — in the preceding paragraph, and not think- 
ing it worth exactly that kind of trouble it would have cost then 
to make himself more explicit for the sake of reaching their 
apprehension, he proceeds to the following argument, which is 
not wanting in clearness for ' those who happen to be of his ear/ 

' Men have proposed to answer two different and contrary 
ends by the use of Parables, for parables serve as well to 
instruct and illustrate, as to wrap up and envelope : [and what 



THE BACONIAN RHETORIC. 1 63 

is more, they serve at once that double purpose] ' so that for 
the present we drop the concealed use, and suppose the ancient 
fables to be vague un determinate things formed for amusement, 
still the other use must remain, and can never be given up. 
And every man of any learning must readily allow that this 
method of instruction is grave, sober, exceedingly useful, 
and sometimes necessary in the sciences, as it opens an easy and 
familiar passage to the human understanding, in all new 
discoveries that are abstruse and out of the road of vulgar 
opinion. Hence, in the first ages, when such inventions and 
conclusions of the human reason as are now trite and common, 
were rare and little known, all things abounded with fables, 
parables, similes, comparisons, allusions, which were not in- 
tended to conceal, but to inform and teach, whilst the minds of 
men continued rude and unpractised in matters of subtlety and 
speculation, and even impatient, and in a manner incapable of 
receiving such things as did not directly fall under and strike the 
senses. * For as hieroglyphics were in use before writings, so 
were parables in use before argument. And even to this day, if 
any man would let new light in upon the human under- 
standing, [who was it that proposed to do that?] and conquer 
prejudices without raising animosities, opposition, or disturb- 
ance — [who was it that proposed to do that precisely — ] he 
must still [ — note it — ] he must still go in the same path, and 
have recourse to the like method.' Where are they then ? Search 
and see. Where are they? — The lost Fables of the New Phi- 
losophy? ' To conclude, the knowledge of the earlier ages was 
either great or happy ; great, if by design they made use of 
tropes and figures; happy, if whilst they had other views they 
afforded matter and occasion to such noble contemplations. Let 
either be the case, our pains perhaps will not be misemployed, 
whether we illustrate antiquity or [hear] things them- 
selves. 

But he complains of those who have attempted such inter- 

* And those ages were not gone by, it seems, for these are the very 
men of whom Hamlet speaks, ' who for the most part are capable of 
nothing but inexplicable dttmb-shows and noise? 

m2 



164 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

pretations hitherto, that ' being unskilled in nature, and their 
learning no more than that of common-place, they have 
applied the sense of the parables to certain general and vulgar 
matters, without reaching to their real purport, genuine inter- 
pretation and full depth ;' certainly it would not be that kind 
of criticism, then, which would be able to bring out the 
subtleties of the new learning from those popular embodiments, 
which he tells us it will have to take, in order to make some 
impression, at least, on the common understanding. ' Settle 
that question, then, in regard to the old Fables as you will, our 
pains will not perhaps be misemployed, whether we illustrate 
antiquity or things themselves,' and to that he adds, ' for my- 
self, therefore, I expect to appear new in these common 
things, because, leaving untouched such as are sufficiently 
plain and open, I shall drive only those that are either deep or 
rich.' ' For myself ? ' — J ? — • I expect to appear new in these 
common things.' But elsewhere, where he lays out the argu- 
ment of them, by the side of that ' resplendent and lustrous 
ma'ss of matter,' those heroical descriptions of virtue, duty, and 
felicity, that others have got glory from, it is some Poet we 
are given to understand that is going to be found new in them. 
There, the argument is all — all — poetic, and it is a theme for 
one who, if he know how to handle it, need not be afraid to 
• put in his modest claim, with those who sung of old, the wrath 
of heroes, and their arms. 

Any one who does not perceive that the passages here 
quoted were designed to introduce more than ' the wisdom of 
the ancients', the reader who is disposed to conclude after a 
careful perusal of these reiterated statements, in regard to the 
form in which doctrines differing from received opinions must 
be delivered, taken in connexion, too, with that draught of 
the new science of the human culture and its parts and points, 
which has just been produced here, — the reader who concludes 
that this is, after all, a science that was able to dispense with 
this method of appeal to the senses and the imagination; that 
it was not obliged to have recourse to that path ; — that the new 
learning, 'the new discovery,' had here no fables, no 



THE BACONIAN RHETOEIC. 1 65 

particular topics, and methods of tradition; that it contented 
itself with abstractions and generalities, with f the husks and 
shells of sciences/ — such an one ought, undoubtedly, to be left 
undisturbed in that opinion. He belongs precisely to that 
class of persons which this author himself deliberately proposed 
to leave to such conclusions. He is one whom this philosopher 
himself would not take any trouble at all to enlighten on such 
points. The other reading, with all its gravity, was designed 
for him. The time for such an one to adopt the reading here 
produced, will be, when ' those who are incapable of receiving 
such things as do not directly fall under and strike the senses/ 
have, at last, got hold of it; when ' the groundlings, who, for 
the most part are capable of nothing but dumb show and noise/ 
have had their ears split with it, it will be time enough for him. 

This Wisdom of the Moderns, then, to resume with those to 
whom the appeal is made, this new learning which the Wise 
Man and Innovator of the Modern Ages tells us must be 
clothed in fable, and adorned with verse, this learning that 
must be made to fall under and strike the senses; this dumb 
show of science, that is but show to him who cannot yet 
take the player's own version of what it means; this illustrated 
tradition, this beautiful tradition of the New Science of 
Human Nature, — where is it? This historical collection, 
this gallery that was to contain scientific draughts and por- 
traitures of the human character, that should exhaust its 
varieties, — where is it? These new Georgics of the mind 
whose argument is here, — where are they? This new Virgil 
who might promise himself such glory, — such new glory in 
the singing of them, — where is he? Did he make so deep a 
summer in his verse, that the track of the precept was lost in 
it? Were the flowers, and the fruit, so thick, there; was the 
reed so sweet that the argument of that great husbandry could 
make no point, — could leave no furrow in it? 

' Where souls do couch on flowers, we '11 hand in hand, 
And with our sprightly port make the ghosts gaze : 
Dido and her iEneas shall want troops, 
And all the haunt be ours.' 



l66 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

' The neglect of our times,' says this author, in proposing 
this great argument, this new argument, of the application of 
SCIENCE to the Culture and Cure of the Mind, ' the neglect of 
our times, wherein few men do hold any consultations touching the 
reformation of their lives, may make this part seem superfluous. 
As Seneca excellently saith, ' De partibus vitse quisquse de- 
liberat, de summa nemo.' And is that, after all, — is that the 
trouble still? Is it, that that characteristic of Elizabeth's time 
— that same thing which Seneca complained of in Nero's, — is 
it that that is not yet obsolete ? Is that the reason, this so 
magnificent part, this radical part of the new discovery of the 
Modern Ages, is still held ' superfluous ? ' 'De partibus vitas 
quisquse deliberat, de summa nemo/ 'Now that we have 
spoken, and spoken for so many ages, of this fruit of life, it 
remaineth to speak of the husbandry thereunto/ That is the 
scientific proposition which has waited now two hundred and 
fifty years, for a scientific audience. The health of the soul, 
the scientific promotion of it, the FRUIT OF LIFE, and the 
observations of its husbandry. ' And if it be said,' he con- 
tinues, anticipating the first inconsiderate objection, 'if it 
be said that the cure of mens' minds belongeth to sacred 
divinity, it is most true; but yet, moral philosophy may be 
preferred unto her, as a wise servant and humble handmaid. 
For as the Psalm saith, that the eyes of the handmaid look 
perpetually towards the mistress, and yet, no doubt, many things 
are left to the discretion of the handmaid, to discern of the 
mistress' will', so ought moral philosophy to give a constant 
attention to the doctrines of divinity, and yet so as it may 
yield of herself, within due limits, many sound and profitable 
directions/ 

For the times that were 'far off' when that proposition was 
made, it is brought out anew and reopened. Oh, people of the 
ages of arts and sciences that are called by this man's name, 
shall we have the fruits of his new doctrine of knowledge, 
brought to our relief in all other fields, and reject it in this, 
which he himself laid out, and claimed as its only worthy field ? 
Instructed now in the validity of its claims, by its * magnitude 



THE BACONIAN EHETORIC. 1 67 

of effects' in every department of the human practice to 
which it has yet been applied, shall we permit the department 
of it, on which his labour was expended, to escape that appli- 
cation ? Shall we suffer that wild barbaric tract of the human 
life, which the will and affections of man create, — that tract 
which he seized, — which it was his labour to collect into an 
art or science, to lie unreclaimed still? 

Oh, Man of the new ages of science, will you have the 
new fore-knowledge, the magical command of effects, which 
the scientific inquiry into causes as they are actual in na- 
ture, puts into our hands, in every other practice, in every 
other culture and cure, — will you have the rule of this know- 
ledge imposed upon your fields, and orchards, and gardens, 
to assist weak nature in her c conservations' and ' advancements' 
in these, — to teach her to bring forth here the latent ideals, 
towards which she struggles and vainly yearns, and can only 
point to, and wait for, till science accepts her hints; — will you 
have the Georgics of this new Virgil to load your table with 
its magic clusters; — will you take the Novum Organum to pile 
your plate with its ideal advancements on spontaneous nature 
and her perfections; — will you have the rule of that Organum 
applied in its exactest rigors, to all the physical oppositions of 
your life, to minister to your physical safety, and comfort, and 
luxury, and never relax your exactions from it, till the last 
conceivable degree of these has been secured; and in this de- 
partment of art and science, — this, in which the sum of our 
good and evil is contained, — in a mere oversight of it, in a dis- 
graceful indifference and carelessness about it, be content to 
accept, without criticism, the machinery of the past — instru- 
mentalities that the unlearned ages of the world have left to us, 
— arts whose precepts were concluded ages ere we knew that 
knoivledge is power. 

Shall we be content to accept as a science any longer, 
a science that leaves human life and its actualities and 
particulars, unsearched, uncollected, unreduced to scientific 
nomenclature and axiom? Shall we be content any longer 
with a knowledge that is power, — shall we boast ourselves 



1 68 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

any longer of a scientific art that leaves human nature, — 
that makes over human nature to the tampering of an un- 
watched, unchecked empiricism, that leaves our own souls 
it may be, and the souls in which ours are garnered up, all 
wild and hidden, and gnarled within with nature's crudities 
and spontaneities, or choked and bitter with artificial, but 
unscientific, unartistic repression? 

Will you have of that divinely appointed and beautiful 
' handmaid,' that was brought in on to this Globe Theatre, 
with that upward look, — with eyes turned to that celestial 
sovereignty for her direction, with the sum of good in her 
intention, with the universal doctrine of practice in her pro- 
gramme, with the relief ' of man's estate and the ' Creator's 
glory* put down in her role, — with her new song — with her 
song of man's nature and life as it is, on her lips — will you 
have of her, only the minister to your physical luxuries and 
baser wants? Be it so: but in the name of that truth which 
is able to survive ages of misunderstanding and detraction, 
in the name of that honor which is armed with arts of self- 
delivery and tradition, that will enable it to live again, 
' though all the earth o'erwhelm it to men's eyes,' while this 
Book of the Advancemcment of Learning stands, do not 
charge on this man henceforth, that election. 

The times of that ignorance in which it could be thus ac- 
credited, are past; for the leader of this Advancement is 
already unfolding his tradition, and opening his books; and 
he bids us debase his name no longer, into a name for these 
sordid fatuities. The Leader of ages that are yet to be, — 
ages whose nobler advancements, whose rational and scientific 
advancements to the dignity and perfection of the human 
form, it was given to him and to his company to plan and 
initiate, — he declines to be held any longer responsible for 
the blind, demoniacal, irrational spirit, that would seize on 
his great instrument of science, and wrest it from its nobler 
object and intent, and debase it into the mere tool of the 
senses; the tool of a materialism more base and sordid than 
any that the world has ever known; more sordid, a thousand- 



THE BACONIAN RHETORIC. 1 69 

fold, than the materialism of ages, when there was yet a god 
in the wood and the stone, when there was yet a god in 
the brick and the mortar. This ' broken science ' that has 
no end of ends, this godless science, this railway learning 
that travels with restless, ever quickening speed, no whither, 
— these dead, rattling ' branches ' and slivers of arts and 
sciences, these modern arts and sciences, hacked and cut away 
from that tree of sciences, from which they sprang, whereon 
they grew, are his no longer. He declines to be held any 
longer responsible for a materialism that shelters itself under 
the name of philosophy, and identifies his own name with it. 
Call it science, if you will, though science be the name for 
unity and comprehension, and the spirit of life, the spirit of 
the largest whole; call it philosophy if you will, if you think 
philosophy is capable of being severed from that common 
trunk, in which this philosopher found its pith and heart, — 
call it science, — call it philosophy, — but call it not, he says, 
■ — call it not henceforth 'Baconian.' 

For his labor is to collect into an art or science the doctrine 
of human life. He, too, has propounded that problem, — 
he has translated into the modern speech, that problem, 
which the inspired Leader of men, of old propounded. 'What 
is a man profited if he should gain the whole world and 
lose his own soul; or what can a man give in exchange for his 
soul?' He, too, has recognized that ideal type of human 
excellence, which the Great Teacher of old revealed and ex- 
emplified; he has found scientifically, — he has found in the 
universal law, — that divine dogma, which was taught of old 
by One who spake as having authority — One who also had 
looked on nature with a loving and observant eye, and found 
in its source, the Inspirer of his doctrine. In his study of 
that old book of divinity which he calls the book of God's 
Power this Modern Innovator has found the scientific version 
of that inspired command ' Be ye therefore perfect.' This new 
science of morality, which is c moral knowledge' is able to recog- 
nise the inspiration and divinity of that received platform and 
exemplar of good, and pours in on it the light of a universal 



170 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

illustration. And in his new scientific policy, in his scientific 
doctrine of success, in his doctrine of the particular and pri- 
vate good, when he brings out at last the rule which shall 
secure it from all the blows of fortune, what is it but that 
same old ' Primum qucerite,' which he produces, — clothing it 
with the authority and severe exaction of a scientific rule in 
art, — that same ' Primum quterite ' which was published of old 
as a doctrine of faith only. c But let men rather build,' he 
says, ' upon that foundation, which is as a corner-stone of 
divinity and philosophy, wherein they join close; namely, that 
same ' Primum quarite? For divinity saith, ' Seek first the 
kingdom of God, and all other things shall be added to you'; 
and philosophy saith, 'Primum quaerite bona animicgetera aut 
aderunt, aut non oberunt.' 

And who will now undertake to say that it is, indeed, 
written in the Book of God, — in the Book of the Providential 
Design, and Creative Law, or that it is written in the Reve- 
lation of a divine good will to men ; that those who cultivate 
and cure the soul — who have a divine appointment to the 
office of its cure — shall thereby be qualified to ignore its 
actual laws, or that they shall find in the scientific investiga- 
tion of its actual history, or in this new — so new, this so 
wondrous and beautiful science, which is here laid out in all 
its parts and points on the basis of a universal science of 
practice, — no 'ministry and suppeditation ' to their end? 
Who shall say that the Regimen of the mind, that its Educa- 
tion and healthful culture, as well as its cure, shall be able to 
accept of no instrumentalities from the advancement of learn- 
ing? Who shall say that this department of the human life 
— this alone, is going to be held back to the past, with bonds 
and cramps of iron, while all else is advancing; that this is 
going to be held forever as a place where the old Aristotelian 
logic, which we have driven out of every other field, can keep 
its hold unchallenged still, — as a place for the metaphysics of 
the school-men, the empty conceits, the old exploded inanities 
of the Dark Ages, to breed and nestle in undisturbed ? 

Who shall claim that this department is the only one, 



THE BACONIAN RHETORIC. 171 

which that gift, that is the last gift of Creation and Provi- 
dence to man is forbidden to enter? 

Surely it is the authorised doctrine of a supernatural aid, 
that it is never brought in to sanction indolence and the neg- 
lect of means and instruments already in our power; and in 
that book of these new ages in which the doctrine of a suc- 
cessful human practice was promulgated, is it not written that 
in no department of the human want, ' can those noble effects, 
which God hath set forth to be bought as the price of labour, 
be obtained as the price of a few easy and slothful observances?', 

And who that looks on the world as it is at this hour, with 
all our boasted aids and instrumentalities, — who that hears that 
cry of sorrow which goes up from it day and night, — who that 
looks at these masses of men as they are, — who that dares to 
look at all this vice and ignorance and suffering which no in- 
strumentality, mighty to relieve, has yet reached, shall think 
to put back, — as if we had no need of it, — this great gift of 
light and healing, — this gift of power, which the scientific ages 
are bringing in; this gift which the ages of 'anticipation/ the 
ages of inspiration and spontaneous affirmation, could only 
divinely — diviningly — foresee and promise; — this gift which 
the knowledge of the creative laws, the historic laws, the laws of 
kind, as they are actual in the human nature and the human 
life, puts into our hands? Who shall think himself compe- 
tent to oppose this benefaction ? Alas for such an one ! let us 
take up a lamentation for him. He has stayed too long; he 
is 'lated in the world.' The constitution of things, the uni- 
versal laws of being, and the Providence of this world are 
against him. The track of the advancing ages goes over 
him. He is at variance with that which was and .shall be. 
The world's wheel goes over him. And whosoever falls on that 
stone shall be broken, but on whomsoever it falls it shall grind 
him to powder. 

It is by means of the scientific Art of Delivery and Tra- 
dition, that this doctrine of the scientific Culture and Cure of 
the Mind, which is the doctrine of the scientific ages, has been 
made over to us in the abstract ; and it is by means of the rule 



172 THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF TRADITION. 

of interpretation, which this x\rt of Delivery prescribes, it is 
by means of the secret of an Illustrated Tradition, or Poetic 
Tradition of this science, that we are now enabled to unlock 
at last those magnificent collections in it — those inexhaustible 
treasures and mines of it — which the Discoverer, in spite of 
the time, has contrived to leave us, in that form of Fable and 
Parable in which the advancing truth has always been left, — 
in that form of Poesy in which the highest truth has, from of 
old, been uttered. For over all this ground lay extended, 
then, in watchful strength all safe and unespied, the basilisk 
of whom the Fable goes, if he sees you first, you die for it, 
— but if YOU SEE HIM FIRST, he dies. And this is the 
Bishop who fought with a mace, because he would kill his 
enemy and not wound him. 



COOK II. 

ELIZABETHAN SECRETS OF MORALITY 
AND POLICY; 

OB, 

THE FABLES OP THE NEW LEARNING. 

Reason cannot be so sensible, nor examples so fit. 

Advancement of Learning. 

INTRODUCTORY 

I. THE DESIGN. 

rpHE object of this Volume is merely to open as a study, and a 
-*- study of primary consequence, those great Works of the 
Modern Learning which have passed among us hitherto, for 
lack of the historical and scientific key to them, as Works of 
Amusement, merely. 

But even in that superficial acquaintance which we have 
had with them in that relation, they have, all the time, been 
subtly operating upon the minds in contact with them, and 
perpetually fulfilling the first intention of their Inventor. 

1 For,' says the great Innovator of the Modern Ages, — the 
author of the Novum Organum, and of the Advancement of Learn- 
ing, — in claiming this department of Letters as the necessary 
and proper instrumentality of a new science, — of a science at 
least, ' foreign to opinions received/ — as he claims elsewhere 
that it is, under all conditions, the inevitable essential form of 
this science in particular. ' Men have proposed to answer two 
different and contrary ends by the use of parables, for they 
serve as well to instruct and illustrate as to wrap up and envelope, 



174 ELIZABETHAN SECRETS OP POLICY. 

so that, though for the present, we drop the concealed use, and 
suppose them to be vague undeterminate things, formed for 
amusement merely, still the other use remains. ' And 
every man of any learning must readily concede/ he says, ' the 
value of that use of them as a method of popular instruction, 
grave, sober, exceedingly useful, and sometimes necessary in 
the sciences, as it opens an easy and familiar passage to the 
human understandings in all new discoveries, that are abstruse 
and out of the road of vulgar opinion. They were used of 
old by philosophers to express any point of reason more sharp 
and subtle than the vulgar, and nevertheless now, and at all 
times, these allusive parabolical forms retain much life and 
vigor, because reason cannot be so sensible nor examples so fit.' 
That philosophic use of them was to inform and teach, whilst 
the minds of men continued rude and unpractised in matters of 
subtilty and speculation, and even impatient and in a manner 
incapable of receiving anything that did not directly fall under 
and strike the senses.' And, even to this day, if any man would 
let new light in upon the human understanding, and conquer 
prejudices without raising animosities, opposition, or disturbance, 
he must still go in the same path and have recourse to the like 
method.' 

That is the use which the History and Fables of the New 
Philosophy have already had with us. We have been feeding 
without knowing it, on the 'principal and supreme sciences' — 
the 'Prima Philosophia' and its noblest branches. We have 
been taking the application of the Inductive Philosophy to the 
principal concerns of our human life, and to the phenomena of 
of the human nature itself, as mere sport and pastime; though 
the precepts concluded, the practical axioms inclosed with it 
have already forced their way into our learning, for all our 
learning is, even now, inlaid and glittering with those ' dis- 
persed directions.' 

We have profited by this use of them. It has not been 
pastime merely with us. We have not spent our time in vain 
on this first stage of an Advancing Learning, a learning that 
will not cease to advance until it has invaded all our empiricisms, 



INTRODUCTORY. — THE DESIGN. 1 75 

and conquered all our practice ; a learning that will recompence 
the diligence, the exactitude, the severity of observance which 
it will require here also (when it comes to put in its claim here, 
as Learning and not Amusement merely) , with that same mag- 
nitude of effects that, in other departments, has already 
justified the name which its Inventor gave it — a Learning 
which will give us here, also, in return for the severity of 
observance it will require, what no ceremonial, however exact- 
ing can give us, that control of effects, with which, even in 
its humblest departments, it has already fulfilled, in the eyes of 
all the world, the prophecy which its Inventors uttered when 
they called it the New Magic. 

That first use of the Histories and Fables of the Modern 
Learning, we have had already ; and it is not yet exhausted. 
But in that rapid development of a common intelligence, 
to which the new science of practice has itself so largely 
contributed, even in its lower and limited developments, we 
come now to that other and so important use of these Fables, 
which the philosophic Innovator proposed to drop for the 
time, in his argument' — that use of them, in which they 
serve ' to wrap up and conceal ' for the time, or to limit to the 
few, who are able to receive them, those new discoveries which 
are as yet too far in advance of the common beliefs and opinions 
of men, and too far above the mental habits and capacities of the 
masses of men, to be safely or profitably communicated to the 
many in the abstract. 

But in order to arrive at this second and nobler use of them, 
it will be necessary to bestow on them a very different kind of 
study from any that we have naturally thought it worth while 
to spend on them, so long as we regarded them as works of pas- 
time merely ; and especially while that insuperable obstacle to any 
adequate examination of them, which the received history of 
the works themselves created, was still operating on the criticism. 

The truths which these Parabolic and Allusive Poems wrap 
up and conceal, have been safely concealed hitherto, because 
they are not those common-place truths which we usually look 
for as the point and moral of a tale which is supposed to have 



176 ELIZABETHAN SECRETS OF POLICY. 

a moral or politic intention, — truths which we are understood 
to be in possession of beforehand, while the parable or instance 
is only designed to impress the sensibility with them anew, 
and to reach the will that would not take them from the 
reason, by means of the senses or the imagination. It is not 
that spontaneous, intuitive knowledge, or those conventional 
opinions, those unanalysed popular beliefs, which we usually 
expect to find without any trouble at all, on the very surface 
of any work that has morality for its object, it is not any such 
coarse, lazy performance as that, that we need trouble -our- 
selvers to look for here. This higher intention in these works 
' their real import, genuine interpretation, and full depth/ has 
not yet been found, because the science which is wrapped in 
them, though it is the principal science in the plan of the 
Advancement of Learning, has hitherto escaped our notice, 
and because of the exceeding subtilty of it, — because the 
truths thus conveyed or concealed are new, and recondite, and 
out of the way of any casual observation, — because in this 
scientific collection of the phenomena of the human life, de- 
signed to serve as the basis of new social arts and rules of 
practice, the author has had occasion to go behind the vague, 
popular, unscientific terms which serve well enough for pur- 
poses of discourse, and mere oratory, to those principles which 
are actual and historical, those simple radical forms and dif- 
ferences on which the doctrine of power and practice must be 
based. 

It is pastime no longer. It is a study, the most patient, the 
most profoundly earnest to which these works now invite us. 
Let those who will, stay in the playground still, and make such 
sport and pastime of it there, as they may ; and let those who 
feel the need of inductive rules here also, — here on the ground 
which this pastime covers — let those who perceive that we 
have as yet, set our feet only on the threshold of the Great 
Instauration, find here with diligent research, the ascent to the 
axioms of practice, — that ascent which the author of the science 
of practice in general, made it his labour to hew out here, for 
he undertook ' to collect hero into an art or science, that which 



INTRODUCTORY — THE DESIGN. 177 

had been pretermitted by others as matters of common sense 
and experience.' 

It does not consist with the design of the present work to 
track that draught of a new science of morality and policy, 
that ' table ' of an inductive science of human nature, and 
human life, which the plan of the Advancement of Learning- 
contains, with all the lettering of its compartments put down, 
into these systematic scientific collections, which the Fables of 
the Modern Learning, — which these magnificent Parabolical 
Poems have been able hitherto to wrap up and conceal. 

This work is merely introductory, and the design of it is to 
remove that primary obstacle to the diligent study of these 
works, which the present theory of them contains; since that 
concealment of their true intention and history, which was 
inevitable at the time, no longer serves the author's pur- 
pose, and now that the times are ripe for the learning which 
they contain, only serves indeed to hinder it. And the illus- 
trations which are here produced, are produced with reference 
to that object, and are limited strictly to the unfolding of those 
' secrets of policy,' which are the necessary introduction to 
that which follows. 



178 ELIZABETHAN SECRETS OF POLICY. 



II. THE MISSING BOOKS OF THE GREAT INSTAURATION ; 
OR, PHILOSOPHY ITSELF. 

Pi ID it never occur to the student of the Novum Organum 
that the constant application of that ' New Machine ' 
by the inventor of it himself, to one particular class of sub- 
jects, so constant as to produce on the mind of the careless 
reader the common impression, that it was intended to be 
applied to that class only, and that the relief of the human 
estate, in that one department of the human want, constituted 
its whole design: did it never occur to the curious inquirer, 
or to the active experimenter in this new rule of learning, 
that this apparently so rigorous limitation of its applications 
in the hands of its author is — under all the circumstances — 
a thing worthy of being inquired into? Considering who 
the author of it is, and that it is on the face of it, a new 
method of dealing with facts in general, a new method of 
obtaining axioms of practice from history in general, and not 
a specific method of obtaining them from that particular de- 
partment of history from which his instances are taken; and, 
considering, too, that the author was himself aware of the 
whole sweep of its applications, and that he has taken pains 
to include in his description of its powers, the assertion, — 
the distinct, deliberate assertion — that it is capable of being 
applied as efficiently, to those nobler departments of the hu- 
man need, which are marked out for it in the Great Instau- 
ration — those very departments in which he was known , 
himself to be so deeply interested, and in which he had been 
all his life such a diligent explorer and experimenter. Did it 
never occur to the scholar, to inquire why he did not apply it, 



PHILOSOPHY ITSELF. 1 79 

then, himself to those very subjects, instead of keeping so 
stedfastly to the physical forces in his illustration of its 
powers. And has any one ever read the plan of this man's 
works? Has any one seen the scheme of that great enterprize, 
for which he was the responsible person in his own time — 
that scheme which he wrote out, and put in among these pub- 
lished acknowledged works of his, which he dared to produce 
in his own name, to show what parts of his e labor/ — what 
part of chief consequence was not thus produced ? Has any one 
seen that plan of a new system of Universal Science, which was 
published in the reign of James the First, under the patronage 
of that monarch ? And if it has been seen, what is the reason 
there has been no enquiry made for those works, in which the 
author ojienly proposes to apply his new organum in person to 
these very subjects ; and that, too, when he takes pains to tell us, 
in reference to that undertaking, that he is not a vain promiser. 

There is a pretence of supplying that new kind of history, 
which the new method of discovery and invention requires as 
the first step towards its conclusions, which is put clown as the 
third part of the Instauration, though the natural history 
which is produced for that purpose is very far from fulfilling 
the description and promise of that division. But where is 
the fourth part of the Great Instauration? Has anj'body 
seen the fourth part? Where is that so important part for 
which all that precedes it is a preparation, or to which it is 
subsidiary? Where is that part which consists of examples, 
that are nothing but a particular application of the second; 
that is, the Novum Organum, — ' and to subjects of the noblest 
kindV Where is ' that part of our work which enters upon 
PHILOSOPHY ITSELF,' instead of dealing any longer, or pro- 
fessing to deal, with THE METHOD merely of finding that 
which man's relief requires, or instead of exhibiting that 
method any longer in the abstract ? Where are the works 
in which he undertakes to show it in operation, with its new 
' grappling hooks ' on the matter of the human life — applied 
by the inventor himself to 'the noblest subjects?' Surely 
that would be a sight to see. What is the reason that our 

n 2 



l80 ELIZABETHAN SECRETS OF POLICY. 

editors do not produce these so important works in their 
editions? What is the reason that our critics do not include 
them in their criticism? What is the reason that our scholars 
do not quote them? Instead of stopping with that mere 
report of the condition of learning and its deficiences, and 
that outline of what is to be done, which makes the first 
part or Introduction to this work; or stopping with the de- 
scription of the new method, or the Novum Organum, which 
makes the SECOND; why don't they go on to the 'new phi- 
losophy itself,' and show us that as well, — the very object of 
all this preparation? When he describes in the SECOND part 
his method of finding true terms, or rather the method of his 
school, when he describes this new method of finding ' ideas,' 
ideas as they are in nature, powers, causes, the elements of 
history, ox forms, as he more commonly calls them, when he 
describes this new method of deducing axioms, axioms that are 
ready for practice, he does, indeed, give us instances; but it so 
happens, that the instances are all of one kind there. They are 
the physical powers that supply his examples in that part. 

In describing this method merely, he produces what he 
calls his Tables of Invention, or Tables of Keview of In- 
stances; but where is that part in which he tells us we shall 
find these same tables again, with ' the nobler subjects' on 
them? He produces them for careful scrutiny in his second 
part; and he makes no small parade in bringing them in. He 
shews them up very industriously, and is very particular to 
direct the admiring attention of the reader to their adaptation 
as means to an end. But certainly there is nothing in that 
specimen of what can be done with them which he contents 
himself with there, that would lead any one to infer that the 
power of this invention, which is the novelty of it, was going 
to be a dangerous thing to society, or, indeed, that they were 
not the most harmless things in the world. It is the true 
cause of heat, and the infallible means of producing that 
under the greatest variety of conditions, which he appears to be 
trying to arrive at there. But what harm can there be in 
that, or in any other discovery of that kind. And there is no 



PHILOSOPHY ITSELF. l8l 

real impression made on any one's mind by that book, that 
there is any other kind of invention or discovery intended in 
the practical applications of this method? The very free, but 
of course not pedantic, use of the* new terminology of a new 
school in philosophy, in which this author indulges — a ter- 
minology of a somewhat figurative and poetic kind, one 
cannot but observe, for a philosopher of so strictly a logical turn 
of mind, one whose thoughts were running on abstractions so 
entirely, to construct; his continued preference for these new 
scholastic terms, and his inflexible adherence to a most pro- 
foundly erudite mode of expression whenever he approaches 
' the part operative' of his work, is indeed calculated to awe 
and keep at a distance minds not yet prepared to grapple 
formally with those t nobler subjects' to which allusion is made 
in another place. King James was a man of some erudition 
himself; but he declared frankly that for his part he could not 
understand this book ; and it was not strange that he could not, 
for the author did not intend that he should. The philosopher 
drops a hint in passing, however, that all which is essential in 
this method, might perhaps be retained without quite so much 
formality and fuss in the use of it, and that the proposed result 
might be arrived at by means of these same tables, without any 
use of technical language at all, under other circumstances. 

The results which have since been obtained by the use of 
this method in that department of philosophy to which it is 
specially applied in the Novum Organum, give to the inquirer 
into jthe causes of the physical phenomena now, some advan- 
tages which no invention could supply them. That was what 
the founders of this philosophy expected and predicted. They 
left this department to their school. The author of the Novum 
Organum orders and initiates this inquiry ; but the basis of the 
induction in this department is as yet wanting; and the collec- 
tions and experiments here require combinations of skill and 
labour which they cannot at once command. They will do 
what they can here too, in their small way, just to make a 
beginning; but they do not lay much stress upon any thing 
they can accomplish with the use of their own method in this 



1 82 ELIZABETHAN SECRETS OF POLICY. 

field. It serves, however, a very convenient purpose with 
them ; neither do they at all underrate its intrinsic importance. 

But the man who has studiously created for himself a social 
position which enables him to assume openly, and even osten- 
tatiously, the position of an innovator — an innovator in the 
world of letters, an advancer of — learning — is compelled to 
introduce his innovation with the complaint that he finds the 
mind of the world so stupified, so bewildered with evil, and so 
under the influence of dogmas, that the first thing to be done 
is to get so much as a thought admitted of the possibility of a 
better state of things. ' The present system of philosophy,' he 
says, ' cherishes in its bosom certain positions or dogmas which 
it will be found, are calculated to produce a full conviction 
that no difficult, commanding, and powerful operation on 
nature ought to be anticipated, through the means of art. 1 And, 
therefore, after criticising the theory and practice of the world 
as he finds it, reporting as well as he can, — though he can find 
no words, he says, in which to do justice to his feeling in 
regard to it — the deficiencies in its learning, he devotes a con- 
siderable portion of the description of his new method to the 
grounds of 'hope' which he derives from this philosophic survey, 
and that that hope is not a hope of a better state of things in 
respect to the physical wants of man merely, that it is not a 
hope of a renovation in the arts which minister to those 
wants exclusively, any very careful reader of the first book of 
the Novum Organum will be apt on the whole to infer. But 
the statements here are very general, and he refers us to another 
place for particulars. 

' Let us then speak of hope' he says, 'especially as we are not 
vain promisers, nor are willing to enforce or ensnare men's judg- 
ments ; but would rather lead them willingly forward. And al- 
though we shall employ the most cogent means of enforcing 
hope when we bring them TO particulars, and especially those 
which are digested and arranged in our Tables of Invention, the 
subject partly of the Second, but — principally — mark it, 
principally of the Fourth part of the Instauration, which are, 
indeed, rather the very objects of our hopes than hope itself.' 



PHILOSOPHY ITSELF. 1 83 

Does he dare to tell us, in this very connection, that he is 
not a vain promises when no such part as that to which he 
refers us here is to be found anywhere among his writings — 
when this principal part of his promise remains unfulfilled. 
' The fourth part of the Instauration/ he says again in his 
formal description of it, ' enters upon philosophy itself, fur- 
nishing examples of inquiry and investigation, according to our 
own method, in certain subjects of the noblest kind, but greatly 
differing from each other, that a specimen may be had 
of every sort. By these examples, we mean not illustrations 
of rules and precepts,* but perfect models, which will ex- 
emplify the second part of this work, and represent, as 
it were, to the eye the whole progress of the mind, and the 
continued structure and order of invention in THE MORE 
chosen subjects' — note it, in the more chosen subjects; 
but this is not at all — 'after the same manner as globes 
and machines facilitate the more abstruse and subtile demonstra- 
tions in mathematics? But in another place he tells us, that 
the poetic form of demonstration is the form to which it is 
necessary to have recourse on these subjects, especially when we 
come to these more abstruse and subtle demonstrations, as it 
opens an easy and familiar passage to the human understanding 
in all new discoveries, that are abstruse and out of the road of 
vulgar opinion; and that at the time he was writing out this 
plan of his works, any one, who would let in new light on the 
human understanding, and conquer prejudices, without raising 
animosity, opposition, or disturbance, had no choice — must go 
in that same path, or none. Where are those diagrams? And 

* He will show the facts in such, order, in such scientific, select, 
methodical arrangements, that rules and precepts will be forced from 
them ; for he will show them, on the tables of invention, and rules and 
precepts are the vintage that flows from the illustrious instances — the 
prerogative instances — the ripe, large, cleared, selected clusters of facts, 
the subtle prepared history which the tables of invention collect. The 
definition of the simple original elements of history, the pure definition 
is the first vintage from these ; but ' that which in speculative philo- 
sophy corresponds to the cause, in practical philosophy becomes the 
rule,' and the axiom of practice, ready for use, is the final result. 



184 ELIZABETHAN SECRETS OF POLICY. 

what does he mean, when he tells us in this connection that he 
is not a vain promiser? Where are those particular cases, in 
which this method of investigation is applied to the noblest sub- 
jects? Where are the diagrams, in which the order of the investi- 
gation is represented, as it were, to the eye, which serve the same 
purpose, ' that globes and machines serve in the more abstruse and 
subtle demonstrations in mathematics?' We are all acquainted 
with one poem, at least, published about that time, in which 
some very abstruse and subtle investigations appear to be in 
progress, not without the use of diagrams, and very lively ones 
too ; but one in which the intention of the poet appears to be 
to the last degree ' enigmatical/ inasmuch as it has engaged the 
attention of the most philosophical minds ever since, and inas- 
much as the most able critics have never been able to compre- 
hend that intention fully in their criticism. And it is bound 
up with many others, in which the subjects are not less care- 
fully chosen, and in which the method of inquiry is the same; 
in which that same method that is exhibited in the ' Novum 
Organ um ' in the abstract,, or in its application to the investiga- 
tion of the physical phenomena, is everywhere illustrated in the 
most chosen subjects — in subjects of the noblest kind. This vo- 
lume, and another which has been mentioned here, contain the 
TniitD and fourth parts of the Great Instauration, whether 
this man who describes them here, and who forgot, it would seem, 
to fulfil his promise in reference to them, be aware of it or not. 

That is the part of the Great Instauration that we want 
now, and we are fairly entitled to it, because these are not ' the 
next ages,' or ' the times which were nearer,' and which this 
author seldom speaks of without betraying his clear foresight 
of the political and social convulsions that were then at hand. 
These are the times, which were farther off, to which he ap- 
peals from those nearer ages, and to which he expressly dedi- 
cates the opening of his designs. 

Now, what is it that we have to find? What is it that is 
missing out of this philosophy? Nothing less than the ' prin- 
cipal ' part of it. All that is good for anything in it, according 
to the author's own estimate. The rest serves merely ' to pass 






PHILOSOPHY ITSELF. 1 85 

the time/ or it is good as it serves to prepare the way for this. 
What is it that we have to look for? The ' Novum Organum,' 
that severe, rigorous method of scientific inquiry, applied to 
the more chosen subjects in the reigns of Queen Elizabeth and 
James I. Tables of Eeview of Instances, and all that Logic 
which is brought out in the doctrine of the prerogative 
instances, whereby the mind of man is prepared for its en- 
counter with fact in general, brought down to particulars, and 
applied to the noblest subjects, and to every sort of subject 
which the philosophic mind of that age chose to apply it to. 
That is what we want to find. 

'The prerogative instances'' in 'the more chosen subjects.' 
The whole field which that philosophy chose for its field, and 
called the noblest, the principal, the chosen, the more chosen 
one. Every part of it reduced to scientific inquiry, put under 
the rule of the c Novum Organum'; that is what we want to 
find. We know that no such thing could possibly be found in 
the acknowledged writings of this author. Nothing answering 
to that description, composed by a statesman and a philosopher, 
with an avowed intention in his writing — an intention to effect 
changes, too, in the actual condition of men, and 'to suborn prac- 
tice and actual life,' no such work by such an author could by 
any means have been got through the press then. No one who 
studies the subject will think of looking for that fourth part 
of the Instauration among the author's acknowledged writings. 
Does he give us any hint as to where we are to look for it? 
Is there any intimation as to the particular form of writing in 
which we are to find it? for find it we must and shall, because 
he is not a vain promiser. The subject itself determines the 
form, he says; and the fact that the whole ground of the dis- 
covery is ground already necessarily comprehended in the pre- 
conceptions of the many — that it is ground covered all over with 
the traditions and rude theories of unlearned ages, this fact, 
also, imperiously determines the method of the inculcation. 
Who that knows what the so-called Baconian method of 
learning really is, will need to be told that the principal books 
of it will be — books of instances and particulars, spe- 



J 86 ELIZABETHAN SECRETS OF POLICY. 

cimens — living ones, and that these will occupy the pro- 
minent place in the book; and that the conclusions and 
precepts will come in as abstractions from these, drawn freshly 
and on the spot from particulars, and, therefore, ready for use, 
'knowing the way to particulars again?' Who would ever 
expect to find the principal books of this learning — the books 
in which it enters upon philosophy itself, and undertakes to 
leave a specimen of its own method in the noblest subjects in 
its own chosen field — who would ever expect to find these 
books, books of abstractions, books of precepts, with instances 
or examples brought in, to illustrate or make them good? 
For this is not a point of method merely, but a point of sub- 
stance, as he takes pains to tell us. And who that has ever 
once read his own account of the method in which he proposes 
to win the human mind from its preconceptions, instead of 
undertaking to overcome it with Logic and sharp disputations, 
— who that knows what place he gives to Rhetoric, what place 
he gives to the Imagination in his scheme of innovation, will 
expect to find these books, books of a dry didactic learning? 
Does the student know how many times, in how many forms, 
under how many different heads, he perseveringly inserts the 
bold assurance, that the form of poesy and enigmatic allusive 
writing is the only form in which the higher applications of 
his discovery can be made to any purpose in that age? Who 
would expect to find this part in any professedly scientific work, 
when he tells us expressly, ' Reason cannot be so sensible, nor 
examples so fit/ as the examples which his scientific termi- 
nology includes in the department of Poesy ? 

All the old historical wisdom was in that form, he says; all 
the first philosophy was poetical; all the old divinity came in 
history and parable; and even to this day, he who would let 
in new light upon the human understanding, without raising 
opposition or disturbance, must still go in the same path, and 
have recourse to the like method. 

He was an innovator; he was not an agitator. And he 
claims that mark of a divine presence in his work, that its 
benefactions come, without noise or perturbation, in aura leni. 






PHILOSOPHY ITSELF. 1 87 

Of innovations, there has been none in history like that which 
he propounded, but neither would he strive nor cry. There 
was no voice in the streets, there was no red ensign lifted, 
there was no clarion-swell, or roll of the conqueror's drum to 
signal to the world that entrance. He, too, claims a divine 
authority for his innovation, and he declares it to be of God. 
It is the providential order of the world's history which is 
revealed in it ; it is the fulfilment of ancient prophecy which 
this new chief, laden with new gifts for men, openly an- 
nounces. 

' Let us begin from God,' he says, when he begins to open 
his ground of hope, after he has exposed the wretched con- 
dition of men as he finds them, without any scientific know- 
ledge of the laws and institutes of the universe they inhabit, 
engaged in a perpetual and mad collision with them ; ' Let us 
begin from God, and show that our pursuit, from its exceeding 
goodness, clearly proceeds from Him, the Author of GOOD 
and Father of light. Now, in all divine works, the smallest 
beginnings lead assuredly to some results; and the rule in 
spiritual matters, that the Kingdom of God cometh without 
observation, is also found to be true in every great work of 
Providence, so that everything glides in quietly, without 
confusion or noise; and the matter is achieved before men 
even think of perceiving that it is commenced.' ' Men,' he 
tells us, ' men should imitate Nature, who innovateth greatly 
but quietly, and by degrees scarce to be perceived,' who will 
not dispense with the old form till the new one is finished and 
in its place. 

What is that we want to find? We want to find the new 
method of scientific inquiry applied to the questions in which 
men are most deeply interested — questions which were then 
imperiously and instantly urged on the thoughtful mind. We 
want to see it applied to politics in the reign of James the 
First. We want to see it applied to the open questions of 
another department of inquiry, — certainly not any less impor- 
tant, — in that reign, and in the reign which preceded it. We 
want to see the facts sifted through those scientific tables of 



1 88 ELIZABETHAN SECRETS OF POLICY. 

review, from which th« true form of sovereignty, the legiti- 
mate sovereignty, is to be inducted, and the scientific axioms 
of government with it. We want to see the science of ob- 
servation and experiment, the science of nature in general, 
applied to the cure of the common-weal in the reign of James 
the First, and to that particular crisis in its disease, in which 
it appeared to the observers to be at its last gasp; and that, 
too, by the principal doctors in that profession, — men of the 
very largest experience in it, who felt obliged to pursue their 
work conscientiously, whether the patient objected or not. 
But are there any such books as these? Certainly. You have 
the author's own word for it. ' Some may raise this question,' 
he says, ' this question rather than objection — [it is better 
that it should come in the form of a question, than in the form 
of an objection, as it would have come, if there had been no 
room to ' raise the question^ — whether we talk of perfecting 
natural philosophy [using the term here in its usual limited 
sense], whether we talk of perfecting natural philosophy alone, 
according to our method, or, the other sciences — such as, 
ethics, logic, politics.' That is the question ' raised.' 
' We certainly intend to comprehend them all.' That is 
the author's answer to it. ' And as common logic which regu- 
lates matters by syllogism, is applied, not only to natural, but 
to every other science, so our inductive method likewise com- 
prehends them all.' With such iteration will he think fit 
to give us this point. It is put in here for those ' who raise 
the question ' — the question ' rather than objection.' The 
other sort are taken care of in other places. ' For,' he con- 
tinues, ' we form a history and tables of invention, for anger, 
fear, shame, and the like; and also for examples in civil life 
[that was to be the principal part of the science when he laid 
out the plan of it in the advancement of learning] and the 
mental operations of memory, composition, division, judgment, 
and the rest; as zoell as for heat and cold, light and vegetation, 
and the like.' That is the plan of the new science, as the 
author, sketches it for the benefit of those who raise questions 
rather than objections. That is its comprehension precisely, 



PHILOSOPHY ITSELF. 1 89 

whenever lie undertakes to mark out its limits for the satis- 
faction of this class of readers. But this is that same fourth 
part to which he refers us in the other places for the applica- 
tion of his method to those nobler subjects, those more chosen 
subjects; and that is just the part of his science which appears 
to be wanting. How happens it? Did he get so occupied 
with the question of heat and cold, light and vegetation, and 
the like, that after all he forgot this part with its nobler 
applications? How could that be, when he tells us expressly, 
that they are the more chosen subjects of his inquiry. This 
part which he speaks of here, is the missing part of his philo- 
sophy, unquestionably. These are the books of it which have 
been missing hitherto; but in that Providential order of events 
to which he refers himself, the time has come for them to be 
inquired for ; and this inquiry is itself a part of that movement, 
in which the smallest beginnings lead assuredly to some result. 
For, ' let us begin from God,' he says, ' and show that our 
pursuit, from its exceeding goodness, clearly proceeds from 
Him, the Author of GOOD, and not of misery; the Father of 
LIGHT, and not of darkness.' 

Of course, it was impossible to get out any scientific doctrine 
of the human society, without coming at once in collision with 
that doctrine of the divinity of arbitrary power which the 
monarchs of England were then openly sustaining. Who 
needs to be told, that he who would handle that argument 
scientifically, then, without military weapons, as this inquirer 
would, must indeed ' pray in aid of similes.' And yet a very 
searching and critical inquiry into the claims of that institution, 
which the new philosophy found in posession of the human 
welfare, and asserting a divine right to it as a thing of private 
property and legitimate family inheritance, — such a criticism 
was, in fact, inevitably involved in that inquiry into the 
principles of a human subjection which appeared to this philo- 
sopher to belong properly to the more chosen subjects of a 
scientific investigation. 

And notwithstanding the delicacy of the subjects, and the 
extremely critical nature of the investigation, when it came 



190 ELIZABETHAN SECRETS OP POLICY. 

to touch those particulars, with which the personal observations 
and experiments of the founders of this new school in philo- 
sophy had tended to enrich their collections in this depart- 
ment, — ' and the aim is better,' says the principal spokesman of 
this school, who quietly proposes to introduce this method into 
politics, ' the aim is better when the mark is alive ; notwith- 
standing the difficulties which appeared to lie then in the way 
of such an investigation, the means of conducting it to the 
entire satisfaction, and, indeed, to the large entertainment of 
the persons chiefly concerned, were not wanting. For this 
was one of those ' secrets of policy/ which have always re- 
quired the aid of fable, and the idea of dramatising the fable 
for the sake of reaching in some sort those who are incapable 
of receiving any thing ' which does not directly fall under, 
and strike the senses,' as the philosopher has it; those who are 
capable of nothing but 'dumb shows and noise/ as Hamlet 
has it; this idea, though certainly a very happy, was not with 
these men an original one. Men, whose relations to the 
state were not so different as the difference in the forms of 
government would perhaps lead us to suppose, — men of the 
gravest learning and enriched with the choicest accomplish- 
ments of their time, had adopted that same method of in- 
fluencing public opinion, some two thousand years earlier, 
and even as long before as that, there were ' secrets of morality 
and policy/ to which this form of writing appeared to offer 
the most fitting veil. 

Whether 'the new' philosopher, — whether ' the new magi- 
cian ' of this time, was, in fact, in possession of any art which 
enabled him to handle without diffidence or scruple the great 
political question which was then already the question of the 
time; whether 'the crown' — that double crown of military 
conquest and priestly usurpation, which was the one estate of 
the realm at that crisis in English history, did, among other 
things in some way, come under the edges of that new analysis 
which was severing all here then, and get divided clearly with 
' the mind, that divine fire/ — whether any such thing as that 
occurred here then, the reader of the following pages will 



PHILOSOPHY ITSELF. 191 

be able to judge. The careful reader of the extracts they 
contain, taken from a work of practical philosophy which 
made its appearance about those days, will certainly have no 
difficulty at all in deciding that question. For, first of all, 
it is necessary to find that political key to the Elizabethan art 
of delivery, which unlocks the great works of the Elizabethan 
philosophy, and that is the necessity which determines the 
selection of the Plays that are produced in this volume. They 
are brought in to illustrate the fact already stated, and already 
demonstrated, the fact whicli is the subject of this volume, 
the fact that the new practical philosophy of the modern 
ages, which has its beginning here, was not limited, in the 
plan of its founders, to ' natural philosophy ' and l the part 
operative'' of that, — the fact that it comprehended, as its 
principal department, the department in which its ' noblest 
subjects ' lay, and in which its most vital innovations were 
included, a field of enquiry which could not then be entered 
without the aid of fable and parable, and one which required 
not then only, ' but now, and at all times,' the aid of a vivid 
poetic illustration; they are brought in to illustrate the fact 
already demonstrated from other sources, the fact that the 
new philosophy was the work of men able to fulfil their work 
under such conditions, able to work, if not for the times that 
were nearer, for the times that were further off; men who 
thought it little so they could fulfil and perfect their work 
and make their account of it to the Work-master, to robe 
another with their glory; men who could relinquish the 
noblest works of the human genius, that they might save 
them from the mortal stabs of an age of darkness, that they 
might make them over unharmed in their boundless freedom, 
in their unstained perfection, to the farthest ages of the 
advancement of learning, — that they might ' teach them how 
to live and look fresh' still, 

' When tyrants' crests, and tombs of brass are spent.' 
That is the one fact, the indestructible fact, which this book 
is to demonstrate. 



LEAR'S PHILOSOPHER. 

' Thou'dst shun a bear; 
But if thy way lay towards the raging sea, 
Thou 'dst meet the bear i' the mouth.' 



CHAPTER I. 

PHILOSOPHY IN THE PALACE. 

• I think the king is but a man, as I am.' — King Henry. 
' They told me I was everything.' — Lear. 

[\P course, it was not possible that the prerogative should be 
^-^ openly dealt with at such a time, questioned, discussed, 
scientifically examined, in the very presence of royalty itself, 
except by persons endowed with extraordinary privileges and 
immunities, persons, indeed, of quite irresponsible authority, 
whose right to do and say what they pleased, Elizabeth herself, 
though they should enter upon a critical analysis of the divine 
rights of kings to her face, and deliberately lay bare the defects 
in that title which she was then attempting to maintain, must 
needs notwithstanding, concede and respect. 

And such persons, as it happened, were not wanting in the 
retinue of that sovereignty which was working in disguise 
here then, and laying the foundations of that throne in the 
thoughts of men, which would replace old principalities and 
powers, and not political dominions merely. To the creative 
genius which waited on the philosophic mind of that age, 
making up in the splendour of its gifts for the poverty of its 
exterior conditions, such persons, — persons of any amount or 
variety of capacity which the necessary question of its play 
might require, were not wanting: — ' came with a thought.' 

Of course, poor Bolingbroke, fevered with the weight of his 
ill-got crown, and passing a sleepless night in spite of its sup- 
posed exemptions, unable to command on his state-bed, with 
all his royal means and appliances, the luxury that the wet sea 
boy in the storm enjoys, — and the poet appears, to have had 



PHILOSOPHY IN THE PALACE. 1 93 

some experience of this mortal ill, which inclines him to put 
it down among those which ought to be excluded from a state 
of supreme earthly felicity, — the poor guilty disgusted usurper, 
discovering that this so blessed ' invention' was not included 
in the prerogative he had seized, under the exasperation of the 
circumstances, might surely be allowed to mutter to himself, 
in the solitude of his own bed-chamber, a few general reflec- 
tions on the subject, and, indeed, disable his own position to 
any extent, without expecting to be called to an account for 
it, by any future son or daughter of his usurping lineage. 
That extraordinary, but when one came to look at it, quite 
incontestable fact, that nature in her sovereignty, imperial still, 
refused to recognize this artificial difference in men, but still 
went on her way in all things, as if ' the golden rigol ' were 
not there, classing the monarch with his c poorest subject;' — 
the fact that this charmed ' round of sovereignty,' did not 
after all secure the least exemption from the common individual 
human frailty, and helplessness, — this would, of course, strike 
the usurper who had purchased the crown at such an expense, 
as a fact in natural history worth communicating, if it were 
only for the benefit of future princes, who might be disposed 
to embark in a similar undertaking. Here, of course, the 
moral was proper, and obvious enough; or close at hand, and 
ready to be produced, in case any serious inquiry should be 
made for it; though the poet might seem, perhaps, to a se- 
verely critical mind, disposed to pursue his philosophical inquiry 
a little too curiously into the awful secrets of majesty, retired 
within itself, and pondering its own position ; — openly search- 
ing what Lord Bacon reverently tells us, the Scriptures pro- 
nounce to be inscrutable, namely, the hearts of kings, and au- 
daciously laying bare those private passages, those confessions, 
and misgivings, and frailties, for which policy and reverence pre- 
scribe concealment, and which are supposed in the play, indeed, 
to be shrouded from the profane and vulgar eye, a circumstance 
which, of course, was expected to modify the impression. 

So, too, that profoundly philosophical suspicion, that a rose, 
or a violet, did actually smell, to a person occupying this 

o 



194 leak's philosopher. 

sublime position, very much as it did to another; a suspicion 
which, in the mouth of a common man, would have been 
literally sufficient to ' make a star-chamber matter of; and all 
that thorough-going analysis of the trick and pageant of 
majesty which follows it, would, of course, come only as a 
graceful concession, from the mouth of that genuine piece of 
royalty, who contrives to hide so much of the poet's own 
'sovereignty of nature,' under the mantle of his free and 
princely humours, the brave and gentle hero of Agincourt. 

' Though / speak it to you/ he says, talking in the disguise 
of a ' private/ ' / think the King is but a man as I am, the 
violet smells to him as it doth to me ; all his senses, have but ■ 
human conditions. His ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness, 
he appears but a man; and though his affections are higher 
mounted than ours, yet, when they stoop, they stoop with the 
like wing. When he sees reason of fears, as we do, his 
fears, out of doubt, be of the same relish as ours are'; and in 
the same scene, thus the royal philosopher versifies, and 
soliloquises on the same delicate question. 

' And what have kings that 'privates' have not, too, save cere- 
mony, — save general ceremony? And what art thou, thou idol 
ceremony ? — What is thy soul of adoration ?' 

A grave question, for a man of an inquiring habit of mind, 
in those times: let us see how a Poet can answer it. 

'Art thou aught else but place, degree and form, 
Creating awe and fear in other men ? 
Wherein, thou art less happy, being feared, 
Than they in fearing ?* 

* Again and again this man has told us, and on his oath, that he che- 
rished no evil intentions, no thought of harm to the king ; and those who 
know what criticisms on the state, as it was then, he had authorised, 
and what changes in it he was certainly meditating and preparing the way 
for, have charged him with falsehood and perjury on that account ; but 
this is what he means. He thinks that wretched victim of that most 
irrational and monstrous state of things, on whose head the crown of 
an arbitrary rule is placed, with all its responsibilities, in his infinite 
unfitness for them, is, in fact, the one whose case most of all requires 
relief. He is the one, in this theory, who suffers from this unnatural 
state of things, not less, but more, than his meanest subject. ' Thou 
art less happy being feared, than they in fearing.' 



PHILOSOPHY IN THE PALACE. 195 

What drink'st thou oft instead of homage sweet 
But poison? d flattery ? 0! be sick, great greatness, 
And bid thy ceremony give thee cure. 
Tbinkest thou the fiery fever will go out 
With titles blown from adulation? 
Will it give place to flexure and low bending V 

Interesting physiological questions ! And though the author, 
for reasons of his own, has seen fit to put them in blank verse 
here, it is not because he does not understand, as we shall see 
elsewhere, that they are questions of a truly scientific character, 
which require to be put in prose in his time — questions of 
vital consequence to all men. The effect of ' poisoned flattery,' 
and ' titles blown from adulation' on the minds, of those to 
whose single will and caprice the whole welfare of the state, 
and all the gravest questions for this life and the next, were 
then entrusted, naturally appeared to the philosophical mind, 
perseveringly addicted to inquiries, in which the practical 
interests of men were involved, a question of gravest moment. 

But here it is the physical difference which accompanies 
this so immense human distinction, which he appears to be in 
quest of; it is the control over nature with which these 
' farcical titles' invest their possessor, that he appears to be now 
pertinaciously bent upon ascertaining. For we shall find, as 
we pursue the subject, that this is not an accidental point 
here, a casual incident of the character, or of the plot, a thing 
which belongs to the play, and not to the author; but that 
this is a poet who is somehow perpetually haunted with the 
impression that those who assume a divine right to control, 
and dispose of their fellow-men, ought to exhibit some sign of 
their authority ; some superior abilities; some magical control; 
some light and power that other men have not. How he came 
by any such notions, the critic of his works is, of course, not 
bound to show ; but that which meets him at the first reading 
is the fact, the incontestable fact, that the Poet of Shakspere's 
stage, be he who he may, is a poet whose mind is in some way 
deeply occupied with this question ; that it is a poet who is 
infected, and, indeed, perfectly possessed, with the idea, that 
the true human leadership ought to consist in the ability to 

o2 



196 lear's philosopher. 

extend the empire of man over nature, — in the ability to unite 
and control men, and lead them in battalions against those com- 
mon evils which infest the human conditions, — not fevers only 
but ' worser' evils, and harder to be cured, and to the conquest 
of those supernal blessings which the human race have always 
been vainly crying for. ' I am a king that find thee,' he says. 

And having this inveterate notion of a true human regality 
to begin with, he is naturally the more curious and prying in 
regard to the claims of the one which he finds in possession; 
and when by the mystery of his profession and art, he contrives 
to get the cloak of that factitious royalty about him, he asks 
questions under its cover which another man would not think 
of putting. 

' Canst thou/ he continues, walking up and down the stage 

in King Hal's mantle, inquiring narrowly into its virtues and 

taking advantage of that occasion to ascertain the limits of the 

prerogative — that very dubious question then, — 

'Canst thou when thou command' st the beggar's knee, 
Command the health of it?' — 

No? what mockery of power is it then? But, this in con- 
nection with the preceding inquiry in regard to the effect of 
titles on the progress of a fever, or the amenability of its pa- 
roxysm, to flexure and low bending, might have seemed per- 
haps in the mouth of a subject to savour somewhat of irony; it 
might have sounded too much like a taunt upon the royal 
helplessness under cover of a serious philosophical inquiry, or 
it might have betrayed in such an one a disposition to pursue 
scientific inquiries farther than was perhaps expedient. But 
thus it is, that the king can dare to pursue the subject, 
answering his own questions. 

'No, thou proud dream 
That play st so subtly with a king's repose ; 
I am a king that find thee ; and I know 
'Tis not the the balm, the sceptre, and the ball, 
The sword, the mace, the crown imperial, 
The inter-tissued robe of gold and pearl, 

The FARCED TITLE — 

What is that? — Mark it: — the farced title! — A bold 
word, one would say, even with a king to authorise it. 



PHILOSOPHY IN THE PALACE. . I97 

The farced title running 'fore the king, 
The throne he sits on, nor the tide of pomp 
That beats upon the high shore of this world, 
No, not all these, thrice gorgeous ceremony, 
Not all these laid in bed majesticae, 
Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave 
Who, with a body filled, and vacant mind, 
Gets him to rest crammed with distressful bread, 
Never sees horrid night, the child of hell, 
But like a lackey from the rise to set 
Sweats in the eye of Phcebus ; and all night 
Sleeps in Elysium. 

Yes, there we have him, at last. There he is exactly. 
That is the scientific picture of him, e poor man,' as this 
poet calls him elsewhere. What malice could a philosophic 
poet bear him ? That is the monarchy that men were ' sanc- 
tifying themselves with,' and ' turning up the white of the eye 
to/ then. That is the figure that it makes when it comes to 
be laid in its state -bed, upon the scientific table of review, 
not in the formal manner of ' the second part '■ of this philo- 
sophy, but in that other manner which the author of the 
Novum Organum, speaks of so frequently, as the one to be 
used in applying it to subjects of this nature. That is the 
anatomy of him, which ' our method of inquiry and investiga- 
tion/ brings out without much trouble ' when we come to 
particulars.' ' Truly we were in good hands/ as the other one 
says, who finds it more convenient, for his part, to discourse 
on these points, from a distance. 

That is the figure the usurping monarch's pretensions make 
at the first blush, in the collections from which ' the vintage ' 
of the true sovereignty, and the scientific principles of govern- 
ments are to be expressed, when the true monarchy, the legiti- 
mate, ' one only man power,' is the thing inquired for. This 
one goes to ' the negative ' side apparently. A wretched 
fellow that cannot so much as ' sleep o' nights,' that lies there 
on the stage in the play of Henry the Fourth, in the sight of 
all the people, with the crown on his very pillow, by way 
of ' facilitating the demonstration,' pining for the ' Elysium.' 
that his meanest subject, — that the poor slave, ' crammed with 
distressful bread,' commands; crying for the luxury that the 



198 lear's philosopher. 

wet seaboy, on his high and giddy conch enjoys; — and from 
whose note-book came that image, dashed with the ocean 
spray, — who saw that seaboy sleeping in that storm? 

But, as for this KING, it is the king which the scientific 
history brings out; whereas, in the other sort of history that 
was in use then, he is hardly distinguishable at all from those 
Mexican kings who undertook to keep the heavenly bodies in 
their places, and, at the same time, to cause all things to be 
borne by the earth which were requisite for the comfort and 
convenience of man; a peculiarity of those sovereigns, of which 
the Man on the Mountains, whose study is so well situated 
for observations of that sort, makes such a pleasant note. 

But whatever other view we may take of it, this, it must be 
conceded, is a tolerably comprehensive exhibition, in the general, 
of the mere pageant of royalty, and a pretty free mode of 
handling it; but it is at the same time a privileged and entirely 
safe one. For the liberty of this great Prince to repeat to him- 
self, in the course of a solitary stroll through his own camp at 
midnight, when nobody is supposed to be within hearing, cer- 
tain philosophical conclusions which he was understood to have 
arrived at in the course of his own regal experience, could 
hardly be called in question. And as to that most extraordinary 
conversation in which, by means of his disguise on this occasion, 
he becomes a participator, if the Prince himself were too gene- 
rous to avail himself of it to the harm of the speakers, it would 
ill become any one else to take exceptions at it. 

And yet it is a conversation in which a party of common 
soldiers are permitted to ' speak their minds freely ' for once, 
though ' the blank verse has to halt for it,' on questions which 
would be considered at present questions of ' gravity.' It is a 
dialogue in which these men are allowed to discuss one of the 
most important institutions of their time from an ethical point 
of view, in a tone as free as the president of a Peace Society 
could itse to-day in discussing the same topic, intermingling 
their remarks with criticisms on the government, and personal 
allusions to the king himself, which would seem to be more in 
accordance with the manners of the nineteenth century, than 
with those of the Poet's time. 



PHILOSOPHY IN THE PALACE. I99 

But then these wicked and treasonous grumblings being for- 
tunately encountered on the spot, and corrected by the king 
himself in his own august person, would only serve for edifica- 
tion in the end; if, indeed, that appeal to the national pride 
which would conclude the matter, and the glory of that great 
day which was even then breaking in the East, should leave 
room for any reflections upon it. For it was none other than 
the field of AgincOurt that was subjected to this philosophic in- 
quiry. It was the lustre of that immortal victory which was 
to England then, what Waterloo and the victories of Nelson 
are now, that was thus chemically treated beforehand. Under 
the cover of that renowned triumph, it was, that these soldiers 
could venture to search so deeply the question of war in gene- 
ral; it was in the person of its imperial hero, that the statesman 
could venture to touch so boldly, an institution which gave to 
one man, by his own confession no better or wiser than his 
neighbours, the power to involve nations in such horrors. 

But let us join the king in his stroll, and hear for ourselves, 
what it is that these soldiers are discussing, by the camp-fires of 
Agincourt; — what it is that this first voice from the ranks has 
to say for itself. The king has just encountered by the way a 
poetical sentinel, who, not satisfied with the watchword — ' a 
friend] — requests the disguised prince ' to discuss to him, and 
answer, whether he is an officer, or base, common, and popular,' 
when the king lights on this little group, and the discussion 
which Pistol had solicited, apparently on his own behalf, ac- 
tually takes place, for the benefit of the Poet's audience, and 
the answer to these inquiries comes out in due order. 

Court. Brother John Bates, is not that the morning which breaks 
yonder 1 

Bates. I think it be, but we have no great cause to desire the ap- 
proach of day. 

Will. We see yonder the beginning of the day, but I think we shall 
never see the end of it. Who goes there 1 

King Henry. A friend. 

Will. Under what captain serve you ? 

King. Under Sir Thomas Erpingham. 

Will. A good old commander, and a most kind gentleman : I pray 
you, what thinks he of our estate ? 



200 lear's philosopher. 

King. Even as men wrecked upon a sand, that look to be washed 
off the next tide. 

Bates. He hath not told his thought to the king 1 

King. No ; nor it is not meet that he should ; for though / speak 
it to you, I think the king is but a man as I am. 

And it is here that he proceeds to make that important 
disclosure above quoted, that all his senses have but human 
conditions, and that all his affections, though higher mounted, 
stoop with the like wing ; and therefore no man should in reason 
possess him with any appearance of fear, lest he, by showing it, 
' should dishearten his army.' 

Bates. He may show what outward courage he will ; but, I believe, 
as cold a night as 'tis, he could wish himself in the Thames, up to the 
neck ; and so I would he were, and I by him, at all adventures, so we 
were quit here. 

King. By my troth, I will speak my conscience of the king. I think 
he would not wish himself anywhere but where he is. 

Bates. Then would he were here alone ; so should he be sure to be 
ransomed, and a many poor men's lives saved. 

King. I dare say you love him not so ill as to wish him here alone ; 
howsoever you speak this to feel other men's minds : Methinks I could not 
die anywhere so contented as in the king's company ; his cause being 
just, and his quarrel honorable. 

Will. Thais more than we know. 

Bates. Ay, or more than we should seek after ; for we know enough, 
if we know we are the king's subjects ; if his cause be wrong, our 
obedience to the king wipes the crime of it out of us. 

Will. But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy 
reckoning to make ; when all those legs and arms and heads chopped 
off in a battle shall join together at the latter day, and cry all — We 
died at such a place ; some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some 
upon their wives left poor behind them : some upon the debts they 
owe ; some upon their children rawly left. I am afeared that few die 
well, that die in battle ; for how can they charitably dispose of any- 
thing when blood is their argument ? Now if these men do not die well, 
it will be a black matter for the king that led them to it ; whom to 
disobey were against all proportion of subjection. 

King. So, if a son that is by his father sent about merchandise, do 
sinfully miscarry upon the sea, the imputation of his wickedness, by your 
rule, should be imposed upon his father that sent him : or if a servant, 
under his master's command, transporting a sum of money, be assailed 
by robbers, and die in many irreconciled iniquities, you may call the 
business of the master the author of the servant's damnation. — But 



PHILOSOPHY IN THE PALACE. 201 

this is not so There is no king, be his cause never so spotless, if 

it come to the arbitrement of swords, can try it out with all un- 
spotted soldiers. 

But the king pursues this question of the royal responsibility 
until he arrives at the conclusion that every subject's duty is 

THE KING'S, BUT EVERY SUBJECT'S SOUL IS HIS OWN, 

until he shows, indeed, that there is but one ultimate sove- 
reignty ; one to which the king and his subjects are alike 
amenable, which pursues them everywhere, with its demands 
and reckonings, — from whose violated laws there is no escape. 

Will. 'Tis certain, every man that dies ill, the ill is upon his own 
head — [no unimportant point in the theology or ethics of that time] — 
the king is not to answer for it. 

Bates. I do not desire the king should answer for me, and yet I 
determine to fight lustily for him. 

King. I, myself, heard the king say, he would not be ransomed. 

Will. Ay, he said so, to make us fight cheerfully; but when our 
throats are cut, he may be ransomed and we ne'er the wiser. 

King. If I live to see it, I will never trust his word after. 

Will. Mass, you'll pay him then! That's a perilous shot out of an 
elder gun, that a poor and private displeasure can do against a monarch. 
You may as well go about to turn the sun to ice, with fanning in his 
face with a peacock's feather. 

And, indeed, thus and not any less absurd and monstrous, 
appeared the idea of subjecting the king to any effect from 
the subject's displeasure, or the idea of calling him to account — 
this one, helpless, frail, private man, as he has just been con- 
ceded by the king himself to be, for any amount of fraud or 
dishonesty to the nation, for any breach of trust or honour. 
For his relation to the mass and the source of this fearful 
irresponsible power was not understood then. The soldier 
states it well. One might, indeed, as well go about to turn the 
sun to ice, with fanning in his face with a peacock's feather. 
' You'll never trust his word after,' the soldier continues. 
' Come, 'tis a foolish saying.' 

' Your reproof is something too round, 1 is the king's reply. 
It is indeed round. It is one of those round replies that this 
poet is so fond of, and the king himself becomes ' the private ' 
of it, when once the centre of this play is found, and the sweep of 



202 LEAR'S PHILOSOPHER. 



its circumference is taken. For the sovereignty of law, the 
kingship of the universal law in whomsoever it speaks, awful 
with God's power, armed with his pains and penalties is the 
scientific sovereignty; and in the scientific diagrams the pas- 
sions, ' the poor and private passions/ and the arbitrary will, 
in whomsoever they speak, no matter what symbols of sove- 
reignty they have contrived to usurp, make no better figure in 
their struggles with that law, than that same which the poet's 
vivid imagination and intense perception of incompatibilities, 
has seized on here. The king struggles vainly against the might 
of the universal nature. It is hut the shot out of an ' elder gun'' 
he might as well ' go about to turn the sun to ice with fanning in 
his face with a, peacock's feather.' ' I should be angry with you,' 
continues the king, after noticing the roundness of that reply, 
1 1 should be angry with you, if the time were convenient.' 

But as to the poet who composes these dialogues, of course 
he does not know whether the time is convenient or not; — he 
has never reflected upon any of those grave questions which 
are here so seriously discussed. They are not questions in which 
he can be supposed to have taken any interest. Of course he 
does not know or care what it is that these men are talking 
about. It is only for the sake of an artistic effect, to pass away 
the night, and to deepen for his hero the gloom which was to 
serve as the foil and sullen ground of his great victory, that 
his interlocutors are permitted to go on in this manner. 

It is easy to see, however, what extraordinary capabilities 
this particular form of writing offered to one who had any 
purpose, or to an author, who wished on any account, to 
' infold' somewhat his meaning; — that was the term used then 
in reference to this style of writing. For certainly, many 
things dangerous in themselves could be shuffled in under 
cover of an artistic effect, which would not strike at the time, 
amid the agitations, and the skilful checks, and counteractions, 
of the scene, even the quick ear of despotism itself. 

And thus King Lear — that impersonation of absolutism — 
the very embodiment of pure will and tyranny in their most 
frantic form, taken out all at once from that hot bath of flatteries 
to which he had been so long accustomed, that his whole self- 



PHILOSOPHY IN THE PALACE. 203 

consciousness had become saturated, tinctured in the grain with 
them, and he believed himself to be, within and without, inde- 
structibly, essentially, — ' ay, every inch A KING;' with speeches 
on his supremacy copied, well nigh verbatim, from those 
which Elizabeth's courtiers habitually addressed to her, still 
ringino in his ears, hurled out into a single-handed contest 
with the elements, stripped of all his ' social and artificial 
lendings,' the poor, bare, unaccommodated, individual man, 
this living subject of the poet's artistic treatment, — this 
'ruined Majesty' anatomized alive, taken to pieces literally 
before our eyes, pursued, hunted down scientifically, and robbed 
in detail of all 'the additions of a king' — must, of course, be 
expected to evince in some way his sense of it; f for soul and 
body/ this poet tells us, ' rive not more in parting than great- 
ness going off.' 

Once conceive the possibility of presenting the action, the 

dumb show, of this piece upon the stage at that time, (there 
have been times since when it could not be done,) and the 
dialogue, with its illimitable freedoms, follows without any 
difficulty. For the surprise of the monarch at the discoveries 
which this new state of things forces upon him, — the speeches 
he makes, with all the levelling of their philosophy, with all 
the unsurpassable boldness of their political criticism, are too 
natural and proper to the circumstances, to excite any sur- 
prise or question. 

Indeed, a king, who, nurtured in the flatteries of the palace, 
was unlearned enough in the nature of things, to suppose that 
the name of a king was anything but a shadow when the power 
which had sustained its prerogative was withdrawn, — a king 
who thought that he could still be a king, and maintain ' his 
state' and ' his hundred knights,' and their prerogatives, and 
all his old arbitrary, despotic humours, with their inevitable 
encroachment on the will and humours, and on the welfare of 
others, merely on grounds of respect and affection, or on 
grounds of duty, when not merely the care of ' the state,' but 
the revenues and power of it had been devolved on others — 
such an one appeared, indeed, to the poet, to be engaging in 
an experiment very similar to the one which he found in pro- 



204 lear's philosopher. 

gress in his time, in that old, decayed, riotous form of military 
government, which had chosen the moment of its utter 
dependance on the popular will and respect, as the fitting one 
for its final suppression of the national liberties. It was an 
experiment which was, of course, modified in the play by some 
diverting and strongly pronounced differences, or it would not 
have been possible to produce it then; but it was still the ex- 
periment of the unarmed prerogative, that the old popular tale 
of the ancient king of Britain offered to the poet's hands, and 
that was an experiment which he was willing to see traced to 
its natural conclusion on paper at least; while in the subse- 
quent development of the plot, the presence of an insulted 
trampled outcast majesty on the stage, furnishes a cover of which 
the poet is continually availing himself, for putting the case of 
that other outraged sovereignty, whose cause under one form 
or another, under all disguises, he is always pleading. And in 
the poet's hands, the debased and outcast king, becomes the 
impersonation of a debased and violated state, that had given 
all to its daughters, — the victim of a tyranny not less absolute, 
the victim, too, of a blindness and fatuity on its own part, 
not less monstrous, but not, not — that is the poet's word — not 
yet irretrievable. 

< Thou shalt find 
I will resume that shape, which thou dost think 
I have cast off" for ever ; thou shalt, I warrant thee.' 
' Do you mark that, my lord ? ' 

But the question of that prerogative, which has consumed, 
in the poet's time, all the faculties of government constitutes 
only a subordinate part of the action of that great play, into 
which it is here incorporated ; a play which comprehends in 
its new philosophical reaches, in its new and before-unimagined 
subtilties of analysis, the most radical questions of a practical 
human science ; questions which the practical reason of these 
modern ages at the moment of its awakening, found itself 
already compelled to grapple with, and master. 



UNACCOMMODATED MAN. 205 



CHAPTER II. 

UNACCOMMODATED MAN. 

'Consider him well. — Three of us are sophisticated.' 

T?OR this is the grand SOCIAL tragedy. It is the tragedy of an 
-*- unlearned human society ; it is the tragedy of a civilization 
in which grammar, and the relations of sounds and abstract 
notions to each other have sufficed to absorb the attention of the 
learned, — a civilization in which the parts of speech, and their 
relations, have been deeply considered, but one in which the 
social elements, the parts of life, and their unions, and their pro- 
sody, have been left to spontaneity, and empiricism, and all 
kinds of rude, arbitrary, idiomatical conjunctions, and fortui- 
tous rules ; a civilization in which the learning of ' WORDS ' 
is put down by the reporter — invented — and the learning of 
' THINGS ' — omitted. 

And in a movement which was designed to bring the 
human reason to bear scientifically and artistically upon those 
questions in which the deepest human interests are involved, 
the wrong and misery of that social state to which the New 
Machine, with its new combination of sense and reason, must 
be applied, had to be fully and elaborately brought out and 
exhibited. And there was but one language in which the 
impersonated human misery and wrong, — the speaker for 
countless hearts, tortured and broken on the rude machinery 
of unlearned social customs, and lawless social forces, could 
speak ; there was but one tongue in which it could tell its 
story. For this is the place where science becomes inevitably 
poetical. That same science which fills our cabinets and her- 
bariums, and chambers of natural history, with mute stones 
and shells and plants and dead birds and insects — that same 
science that fills our scientific volumes with coloured pictures 



206 leak's philosopher. 

true as life itself, and letter-press of prose description — that 
same science that anatomises the physical frame with micro- 
scopic nicety, — in the hand of its master, found in the soul, that 
which had most need of science; and his c illustrated book' of it, 
the book of his experiments in it, comes to us filled with his 
yet living, ' ever living ' subjects, and resounding with the 
tragedy of their complainings. 

It requires but a little reading of that book to find, that the 
author of it is a philosopher who is strongly disposed to ascer- 
tain the limits of that thing in nature, which men call fortune, 

— that is, in their week-day speech, — they have another name 
for it ' o' Sundays.' He is greatly of the opinion, that the 
combined and legitimate use of those faculties with which man 
is beneficently ' armed against diseases of the world,' would 
tend very much to limit those fortuities and accidents, those 
wild blows, — those vicissitudes, that men, in their ignorance and 
indolent despair, charge on Fate or ascribe to Providence, 
while at the same time it would furnish the art of accommodat- 
ing the human mind to that which is inevitable. It is not for- 
tune who is blind, but man, he says, — a creature endowed of 
nature for his place in nature, endowed of God with a godlike 
faculty, looking before and after — a creature who has eyes, 
eyes adapted to his special necessities, but one that will not 
use them. 

Acquaintance with law, as it is actual in nature, and inven- 
tions of arts based on that acquaintance, appear to him to open 
a large field of relief to the human estate, a large field of en- 
croachment on that human misery, which men have blindly 
and stupidly acquiesced in hitherto, as necessity. For this is 
the philosopher who borrows, on another page, an ancient 
fable to teach us that that is not the kind of submission which 
is pleasing to God — that that is not the kind of * suffering ' 
that will ever secure his favour. He, for one, is going to 
search this social misery to the root, with that same light 
which the ancient wise man tells us, ' is as the lamp of God, 
wherewith He searcheth the inwardness of all secrets.' 

The weakness and ignorance and misery of the natural man, 

— the misery too of the artificial man as he is, — the misery of 



UNACCOMMODATED MAN. 20/ 

man in society, when that society is cemented with arbitrary 
customs, and unscientific social arts, and when the instinctive 
spontaneous demoniacal forces of nature, are at large in it; the 
dependence of the social Monad, the constitutional specific 
human dependence, on the specific human law, — the exquisite 
human liability to injury and wrong, which are but the natu- 
ral indications of those higher arts and excellencies, those 
unborn pre-destined human arts and excellencies, which man 
must struggle through his misery to reach; — that is the scien- 
tific notion which lies at the bottom of this grand ideal repre- 
sentation. It is, in a word, the human social need, in all its 
circumference, clearly sketched, laid out, scientifically, as the 
basis of the human social art. It is the negation of that which 
man's conditions, which the human conditions requii?: — it is 
the collection on the Table of Exclusion and Rejection, which 
must precede the practical affirmation. 

King. Have you heard the argument 1 Is there no offence in it 1 
Hamlet. None in the world. It's the image of a murder done in 
Vienna. 

In the poetic representation of that state of things which 
was to be redressed, the central social figure must, of course, 
have its place. For it is the Poet, the Experimental Poet, 
unseen indeed, deep buried in his fable, his new movements 
all hidden under its old garb, and deeper hidden still, in the 
new splendours he puts on it — it is the Poet — invisible but not 
the less truly, he, — it is the Scientific Poet, who comes upon 
the monarch in his palace at noonday, and says, ' My business 
is with thee, king/ It is he who comes upon the selfish 
arrogant old despot, drunk with Elizabethan flatteries, stuffed 
with ' titles blown from adulation,' unmindful of the true ends 
of government, reckless of the duties which that regal assump- 
tion of the common weal brings with it — it is the Poet who 
comes upon this Doctor of Laws in the palace, and prescribes 
to him a course of treatment which the royal patient himself, 
when once it has taken effect, is ready to issue from the 
hovel's mouth, in the form of a general prescription and state 
ordinance. 



208 lear's philosopher. 

1 Take physic, pomp ; 
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, 
That thou may'st shake the superflux to them, 
And show the heavens more just. 

Oh, I have taken too little care of this !' 

It is that same Poet who has already told us, confidentially, 
under cover of King Hal's mantle, that ' the king himself is 
but a man ' and that ' all his senses have but human conditions, 
and that his affections, too, though higher mounted when they 
stoop, stoop with the like wing; that his ceremonies laid by, 
in his nakedness he appears but a man ' ; — it is that same Poet, 
and, in carrying out the purpose of this play, it has come in 
his way now to make good that statement. For it was neces- 
sary to his purpose here, to show that the State is composed 
throughout, down to its most loathsome unimaginable depths 
of neglect and misery, of individual men, social units, clothed 
of nature with the same faculties and essential human dignities 
and susceptibilities to good and evil, and crowned of nature 
with the common sovereignty of reason, — down-trodden, per- 
haps, and wrung and trampled out of them, but elected of 
nature to that dignity; it was necessary to show this, in order 
that the wisdom of the State which sacrifices to the senses of 
one individual man, and the judgment that is narrowed by the 
one man's senses, the weal of the whole, — in order that the 
wisdom of the State, which puts at the mercy of the arbitrary 
will and passions of the one, the weal of the many, might be 
mathematically exhibited, — might be set down in figures and 
diagrams. For this is that Poet who represents this method 
of inquiry and investigation, as it were, to the eye. This is 
that same Poet, too, who surprises elsewhere a queen in her 
swooning passion of grief, and bids her murmur to us her 
recovering confession. 

' No more, but e'en a woman ; and commanded 
By such poor passion, as the maid that milks, 
And does the meanest chares.' 

So busy is he, indeed, in laying by this king's ' ceremonies ' 
for him, beginning with the first doubtful perception of a most 
faint neglect, — a falling off in the ceremonious affection due 



UNACCOMMODATED MAN. 200, 

to majesty ' as well in the general dependants as in the duke 
himself and his daughter/ — so faint that the king dismisses it 
from his thought, and charges it on his own jealousy till he is 
reminded of it by another, — beginning with that faint begin- 
ning, and continuing the process not less delicately, through 
all its swift dramatic gradations, — the direct abatement of the 
regal dignities, — the knightly train diminishing, — nay, ' fifty 
of his followers at a clap' torn from him, his messenger put in 
the stocks, — and ' it is xoorse than murder,' the poor king cries 
in the anguish of his slaughtered dignity and affection, ' to do 
upon respect such violent outrage,' — so bent is the Poet upon 
this analytic process; so determined that this shaking out of a 
'preconception,' shall be for once a thorough one, so absorbed 
with the dignity of the scientific experiment, that he seems 
bent at one moment on giving a literal finish to this process; 
but the fool's scruples interfere with the philosophical humour 
of the king, and the presence of Mad Tom in hi3 blanket, with 
the king's exposition, suffices to complete the demonstration. 
For not less lively than this, is the preaching and illustration, 
from that new rostrum which this ' Doctor ' has contrived to 
make himself master of. ' His ceremonies laid by, in his 
nakedness he appears but a man,' says King Hal. ' Couldst 
thou save nothing ?' says King Lear to the Bedlamite. ' Why 
thou wert better in thy grave than to answer with thy un-. 
covered body this extremity of the skies.' e Is man,' — it is the 
Mag who generalises, it is the king who introduces this level- 
ling suggestion here in the abstract, while the Poet is content 
with the responsibility of the concrete exhibition — ' Is man no 
more than this? Consider him well. Thou owest the worm no 
silk, the beast no hide, the cat no perfume : — Ha I here's three 
of us are sophisticated. Thou art the thing itself. Unac- 
commodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked 
animal, as thou art. Off, off, you lendings.' But ' the fool ' 
is of the opinion that this scientific process of unwrapping the 
artificial majesty, this philosophical undressing, has already 
gone far enough. 

'Pry'thee, Nuucle, be contented,' he says, ' it is a naughty night to 
swim in.' 

P 



210 LEAH'S PHILOSOPHER. 

For it is the great heath wrapped in one of those storms of 
wind and rain and thunder and lightning, which this wizard 
only of all the children of men knows how to raise, that he 
chooses for his physiological exhibition of majesty, when the 
palace-door has been shut upon it, and the last 'additions of a 
king ' have been subtracted. It is a night — 

' Wherein the cub-drawn bear would couch, 
The lion, and the belly-pinched wolf 
Keep their fur dry ' — 

into which he turns his royal patient ' unbonneted? 

For the tyranny of wild nature in her elemental uproar must 
be added to the tyranny of the human wildness, the cruelty 
of the elements must conspire, like pernicious ministers, 
with the cruelty of arbitrary human will and passions, the 
irrational, inhuman social forces must be joined by those 
other forces that make war upon us, before the real purpose of 
this exhibition and the full depth and scientific comprehension 
of it can begin to appear. It is in the tempest that Lear finds 
occasion to give out the Poet's text. Is man no more than 
this ? Consider him well. Unaccommodated man in his 
struggle with nature. Man without social combinations, man 
without arts to aid him in his battle with the elements, or with 
arts that fence in his body, and robe it, it may be, in delicate 
and gorgeous apparelling, arts that roof his head with a 
princely dome it may be, and add to his native dignity and 
forces, the means and appliances of a material civilization, but 
leave his nobler nature with its more living susceptibility to 
injury, unsheathed, at the mercy of the brute forces that un- 
scientific civilizations, with their coarse laws, with their cob- 
webs of WORDY learning, with their science of abstractions, 
unmatched with the subtilty of things, are compelled to 
leave at large, uncaught, unentangled. 

Yes, it is man in his relation to nature, man in his depend- 
ence on artificial aid, man in his two-fold dependence en art, 
that this tempest, this double tempest wakes and brings out, 
fur us to ' consider,' — to ' consider well ' ; — ' the naked crea- 



UNACCOMMODATED MAN. 211 

ture,' that were better in his grave than to answer with his 
uncovered body that extremity of the skies, and by his side, 
with his soul uncovered to a fiercer blast, his royal brother 
with ' the tempest in his mind, that doth from his senses take 
all feeling else, save what beats there/ 

It is the personal weakness, the moral and intellectual as 
well as the bodily frailty and limitation of faculty, and liability 
to suffering and outrage, the liability to wrong from treachery, 
as well as violence, which are ' the common' specific human con- 
ditions, common to the King in his palace, and Tom o' Bedlam 
in his hovel; it is this exquisite human frailty and suscepti- 
bility, still unprovided for, that fills the play throughout, and 
stands forth in these two, impersonated ; it is that which fills 
all the play with the outcry of its anguish. 

And thus it is, that this poor king must needs be brought 
out into this wild uproar of nature, and stripped of his last 
adventitious aid, reduced to the authority and forces that nature 
gave him, invaded to the skin, and ready in his frenzy to 
second the poet's intent, by yielding up the last thread of his 
adventitious and artistic defences. All his artificial, social per- 
sonality already dissolved, or yet in the agony of its dissolution, 
all his natural social ties torn and bleeding within him, there 
is yet another kind of trial for him, as the elected and royal 
representative of the human conditions. For the perpetual, 
the universal interest of this experiment arises from the fact, 
that it is not as the king merely, dissolving like ' a mockery 
king of snow ' that this illustrious form stands here, to undergo 
this fierce analysis, but as the representative, ' the conspicuous 
instance,' of that social name and figure, which all men carry 
about with them, and take to be a part of themselves, that 
outward life, in which men go beyond themselves, by means 
of their affections, and extend their identity, incorporating 
into their very personality, that floating, contingent material 
which the wills and humours and opinions, the prejudices and 
passions of others, and the variable tide of this world's fortunes 
make — that social Name and Figure in which men may die 
many times, ere the physical life is required of them, in whicn 

p 2 



212 LE All's PHILOSOPHER. 

all men must needs live if they will live in it at all, at the 
mercy of these uncontrolled social eventualities. 

The tragedy is complicated, but it is only that same compli- 
cation which the tragedy it stands for, is always exhibiting. 
The fact that this blow to his state is dealt to him by those to 
whom nature herself had so dearly and tenderly bound him, 
nay, with whom she had so hopelessly identified him, is that 
which overwhelms the sufferer. It is that which he seeks to 
understand in vain. He wishes to reason upon it, but his mind 
cannot master it; under that it is that his brain gives way, — the 
first mental confusion begins there. The blow to his state is a 
subordinate thing with him. It only serves to measure the 
wrong that deals it. The poet takes pains to clear this com- 
plication in the experiment. It is the wound in the affections 
which untunes the jarring senses of ' this child-changed father.' 
It is that which invades his identity. 

' Are you our daughter ? Does any one here know me ? ' 
That is the word with which he breaks the silence of that 
dumb amazement, that paralysis of frozen wonder which 
Goneril's first rude assault brings on him. ' Why, this is not 
Lear; Ha ! sure it is not so. Does any one here know me ? 
Who is it that can tell me who I am ?' 

But with all her cruelty, he cannot shake her off. He 
curses her; but his curses do not sever the tie. 

' But yet thou art my flesh, my blood, my daughter. 
Or rather, a disease that's in my flesh 
Which I must needs call mine. 

Filial ingratitude ! 
Is it not as this mouth should tear this hand 
For lift i7ig food to it? 1 

For that is the poet's conception of the extent of this social 
life and outgoing — that is the interior of that social whole, in 
which the dissolution he represents here is proceeding, — and that 
is the kind of new phenomenon which the science of man, 
when it takes him as he is, not the abstract man of the schools, 
not the logical man that the Realists and the Nominalists went 
to blows for, but ' the thing itself,' exhibits. As to that other 



UNACCOMMODATED MAN. 213 

4 man, 1 — the man of the old philosophy, — he was not ' worth the 
whistle,' this one thinks. ' His bones were marrowless, his blood 
was cold, he had no speculation in those eyes that he did glare 
with.' The New Philosopher will have no such skeletons in 
his system. He is getting his general man out of particular 
cases, building him up solid, from a basis of natural history, 
and, as far as he goes, there will be no question, no two words 
about it, as to whether he is or is nut. ' For I do take,' says 
the Advancer of Learning, ' the consideration in general, and at 
large, of Human Nature, to be fit to be emancipated and made 
a knowledge by itself.' No wonder if some new aspects of these 
ordinary phenomena, these ' common things,' as he calls them, 
should come out, when they too come to be subjected to a 
scientific inquiry, and when the Poet of this Advancement, 
this so subtle Poet of it, begins to explore them. 

And as to this particular point which he puts down with so 
much care, this point which poor Lear is illustrating here, viz. 
* that our affections carry themselves beyond us,' as the sage of 
the ' Mountain ' expresses it, this is the view the same Poet 
gives of it, in accounting for Ophelia's madness. 

4 Nature is fine in love ; and where 'tis fine, 
It sends some precious instance of itself, 
After the thing it loves.' 

4 Your old kind father,' continues Lear, searching to the 
quick the secrets of this 4 broken-heartedness,' as people are 
content to call it, this ill to which the human species is 
notoriously liable, though philosophy had not thought it 
worth while before ' to find it out;' 

' Your old kind father, whose frank heart gave all, — 
O that way madness lies ; let me shun that, 
No more of that? 

And it is while he is still undergoing the last extreme of 
the suffering which the human wrong is capable of inflicting 
on the affections, that he comes in the Poet's hands to exhibit 
also the unexplored depth of that wrong, — that monstrous, 
inhuman social error, that perpetual outrage on nature in her 
human law, which leaves the helpless human outcast to the 



214 leak's philosopher. 

rough discipline of nature, which casts him out from the 

family of man, from its common love and shelter, and leaves 

him in his vices, and helplessness, and ignorance, to contend 

alone with great nature and her unrelenting consequences. 

. ' To wilful men 
The injuries that they themselves procure, 
Must be their school-masters,' — 

is the point which the philosophic Kegan makes, as she bids 

them shut the door in her father's face; but it is the common 

human relationship that the Poet is intent on clearing, while 

he notes the special relationship also ; he does not limit his 

humanities to the ties of blood, or household sympathies, or 

social gradations. 

But Began'? views on this point are seconded and sustained, 

and there seems to be but one opinion on the subject among 

those who happen to have that castle in possession; at least 

the timid owner of it does not feel himself in a position to 

make any forcible resistance, to the orders which his illustrious 

guests, who have ' taken from him the use of his own house,' 

have seen fit to issue in it. ' Shut up your doors, (says Cornwall), 

' Shut up your doors, my lord : 'tis a wild night. 
My Regan counsels well ; come out o' the storm.' 

And it is because this representation is artistic and dramatic, 
and not simply historical, and the Poet must seek to condense, 
and sum and exhibit in dramatic appreciable figures, the un- 
reckonable, undefinable historical suffering of years, and life- 
times of this vain human struggle, — because, too, the wildest 
threats which nature in her terrors makes to man, had to be 
incorporated in this great philosophic piece; and because, 
lastly, the Poet would have the madness of the human will 
and passion, presented in its true scientific relations, that this 
storm collects into itself such ideal sublimities, and borrows 
from the human passion so many images of cruelty. 

In all the mad anguish of that ruined greatness, and 
wronged natural affection, the Poet, relentless as fortune 
herself in her sternest moods, intent on his experiment only, 
will bring out his great victim, and consign him to the wind 



UNACCOMMODATED MAN. 215 

and the rain, and the lightning, and the thunder, and bid his 
senses undergo their ' horrible pleasure.' 

For the senses, scorned as they had been in philosophy 
hitherto, the senses in this philosophy, have their report also, 
— their full, honest report, to make to us. And the design of 
this piece, as already stated in the general, required in its 
execution, not only that these two kinds of suffering, these 
two grand departments of human need, should be included 
and distinguished in it, but that they should be brought 
together in this one man's experience, so that a deliberate 
comparison can be instituted between them; and the Poet will 
bid the philosophic king, the living ' subject' himself, report 
the experiment, and tell us plainly, orce for all, whether the 
science of the physical Arts only, is the science which is 
wanting to man; or whether arts — scientific arts — 1*1 -.<*., take 
hold of the moral nature, also, and deal with that not isss 
eifectively, can be dispensed with; whether, indeed, man is 
in any condition to dispense with the Science and the Art 
which puts him into intelligent and harmonious relations with 
nature in general. 

It was necessary to the purpose of the play to exhibit man's 
dependance on art, by means of his senses and his sensibilities, 
and his intellectual conditions, and all his frailties and liabili- 
ties, — his dependence on art, based on the knowledge of 
natural laws, universal laws, — constitutions, which include the 
human. It was necessary to exhibit the whole misery, the 
last extreme of that social evil, to which a creature so naturally 
frail and ignorant is liable, under those coarse, fortuitous, 
inartistic, unscientific social conglomerations, which ignorant 
and barbarous ages build, and under the tyranny of those 
wild, barbaric social evils, which our fine social institutions, 
notwithstanding the universality of their terms, and the 
transcendant nature of the forces which they are understood 
to have at their disposal, for some fatal reason or other, do not 
yet succeed in reducing. 

It is, indeed, the whole ground of the Scientific Human Art, 
which is revealed here by the light of this great passion, and 



216 lear's philosopher. 

that, in this Poet's opinion, is none other than the ground of 
the human want, and is as large and various as that. And 
the careful reader of this play, — the patient searcher of its 
subtle lore, — the diligent collector of its thick-crowding 
philosophic points and flashing condensations of discovery, 
will find that the need of arts, is that which is set forth in it, 
with all the power of its magnificent poetic embodiment, and 
in the abstract as well, — the need of arts infinitely more noble 
and effective, more nearly matched with the subtlety of 
nature, and better able to entangle and subdue its oppositions, 
than any of which mankind have yet been able to possess 
themselves, or ever the true intent^ cj/ nature in the human 
form can be realized, or *»/ thing like a truly Huirra-u Constitu- 
tion, or Com^n-Weal, is possible. 

Tt*t lot us return to the comparison, and collect the results 
of this experiment. — For a time, indeed, raised by that storm 
of grief and indignation into a companionship with the wind 
and the rain, and the lightning, and the thunder, the king 
' strives in his little world of man,' — for that is the phrasing of 
the poetic report, to out-scorn these elements. Nay, we our- 
selves hear, as the curtain rises on that ideal representative 
form of human suffering, the wild intonation of that human 
defiance — mounting and singing above the thunder, and 
drowning all the elemental crash with its articulation; for 
this is an experiment which the philosopher will try in the 
presence of his audience, and not report it merely. With 
that anguish in his heart, the crushed majesty, the stricken 
old man, the child-wounded father, laughs at the pains of the 
senses; the physical distress is welcome to him, he is glad of it. 
He does not care for anything that the unconscious, soulless 
elements can do to him, he calls to them from their heights, 
and bids them do their worst. Or it is only as they conspire 
with that wilful human wrong, and serve to bring home to him 
anew the depth of it, by these tangible, sensuous effects, — it 
is only by that means that they are able to wound him. 

' Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are rny daughters,' 
that is the argument. 



UNACCOMMODATED MAN. IIJ 

' 1 tax you not, you elements, with mikindness.' 

Surely that is logical; that is a distinction not without a dif- 
ference, and appreciable to the human mind, as it is consti- 
tuted, — surely that is a point worth putting in the arts and 
sciences. 

' I never gave you kingdoms, called you children ; 
You owe me no subscription ; why, then, let fall 
Your horrible pleasure ? Here I stand your slave, 
A jjoor, infirm, weak, and despised old man ; 
But yet, I call you servils ministers, 
That have with two pernicious daughters joined 
Your high, engendered battles 'gainst a head 
So old and wnue as it : s. O, O, 'tis foul.'' 

And in his calmer mood, when the storm has 5.?ne its work 
upon him, and all the strength of his great passion is exi^^sted, 
— when his bodily powers are fast sinking under it, and like 
the subtle Hamlet's • potent poison,' it begins at last to ' o'er- 
crow his spirit' — when he is faint with struggling with its 
fury, wet to the skin with it, and comfortless and shivering, 
he still maintains through his chattering teeth the argument; 
he will still defend his first position — 

' Thou thinkst 'tis much that this contentious storm 
Invades us to the skin ; so 'tis to thee. 
But where the greater malady is fixed, 
The lesser is scarce felt.' 

' The tempest in my mind 
Doth from my senses take all feeling else, 
Save what beats there.' 

' In such a night 
To shut me out ! Pour on, I will endure. 
In such a night as this." 1 

And when the shelter he is at last forced to seek is found, 
at the door his courage fails him ; and he shrinks back into 
the storm again, because ' it will not give him leave to think 
on that which hurts him more^ 

So nicely does the Poet balance these ills, and report the 
swaying movement. But it is a poet who does not take 



218 leak's philosopher. 

common-place opinions on this, or on any other such subject. He 
is one whose poetic work does not consist in illustrating these 
received opinions, or in finding some novel and fine expression 
for them. He is observing nature, and undertaking to report 
it, as it is, not as it should be according to these preconceptions, 
or according to the established poetic notions of the heroic 
requisitions. 

But there is no stage that can exhibit his experiment here 
in its real significance, excepting that one which he himself 
builds for us ; for it is the vast lonely heath, and the Man, the 
pigmy man, on it — and the KING, the pigmy king, on it; — it 
is all the wild roar of elemental nature, and the tempest in 
that ' little world of man,' that have to measure their forces, 
that have to be brought into continuous and persevering 
contest. It is not Gloster only, who sees in that storm what 
• makes him think that a man is but a worm. 1 

Doubtless, it would have been more in accordance with the 
old poetic notions, if this poor king had maintained his 
ground without any misgiving at all; but it is a poet of a 
new order, and not the old heroic one, who has the con- 
ducting of this experiment; and though his verse is not without 
certain sublimities of its own, they have to consist with the 
report of the fact as it is, to its most honest and unpoetic, un- 
heroic detail. 

And notwithstanding all the poetry of that passionate de- 
fiance, it is the physical storm that triumphs in the end. The 
contest between that little world of man and the great out- 
door world of nature was too unequal. Compelled at last to 
succumb, yielding to ' the tyranny of the open night, that is 
too rough for nature to endure — the night that frightens the 
very wanderers of the dark, and makes them keep their caves,' 
while it reaches, with its poetic combination of horrors, 
that border line of the human conception which great 
Nature's pencil, in this Poet's hand, is always reaching and 
completing, — 

'Maris nature cannot carry 
The affliction nor the fear? 



UNACCOMMODATED MAN. 210, 

— Unable to contend any longer with ' the fretful element ' — 
unable to ' out scorn ' any longer ' the to and fro conflicting 
wind and rain' — weary of struggling with ■' the impetuous 
blasts,' that in their ' eyeless rage ' and 'fury ' care no more for 
age and reverence than his daughters do — that seize his white 
hairs, and make nothing of them — ' exposed to feel what 
wretches feel' — he finds at last, with surprise, that art — the 
wretch's art — that can make vile things precious. !No longer 
clamoring for ' the additions of a king/ but thankful for the 
basest means of shelter from the elements, glad to avail him- 
self of the rudest structure with which art ' accommodates ' man 
to nature, (for that is the word of this philosophy, where it is 
first proposed) — glad tc divide with his meanest subject that 
shelter which the outcast seeks on such a night — ready to 
creep with him, under it, side by side — 'fain to hovel with 
swine and rogues forlorn, in short and musty straw' — surely 
we have reached a point at last where the action of the piece 
itself — the mere ' dumb show ' of it — becomes luminous, and 
hardly needs the player's eloquence to tell us what it means. 

Surely this is a little like ' the language ' of Periander's 
message, when he bid the messenger observe and report what 
he saw him do. It is very important to note that ideas may be 
conveyed in this way as well as by words, the author of the 
Advancement of Learning remarks, in speaking of the tradition 
of the principal and supreme sciences. He takes pains to 
notice, also, that a representation, by means of these 'transient 
hieroglyphics,' is much more moving to the sensibilities, and 
leaves a more vivid and durable impression on the memory, 
than the most eloquent statement in mere words. 'What is 
sensible always strikes the memory more strongly, and sooner 
impresses itself, than what is intellectual. Thus the memory 
of brutes is excited by sensible, but not by intellectual things;' 
and thus, also, he proposes to impress that class which Corio- 
lanus speaks of, ' whose eyes are more learned than their ears,' 
to whom ' action is eloquence.' Here we have the advantage of 
the combination, for there is no part of the dumb show, but 
has its word of scientific comment and interpretation. 



220 . LEAR'S PHILOSOPHER. 

< Art cold [to the Fool] 1 
I am cold myself. Where is this straw, my fellow / 
The art of our necessities is strange, 
That can make vile things precious. Come, your hovel. 
Come, bring us to this hovel? 

For this is what that wild tragic poetic resistance and de- 
fiance conies to — this is what the ' unaccommodated man ' 
comes to, though it is the highest person in the state, stripped 
of his ceremonies and artificial appliances, on whom the ex- 
periment is tried. 

' Where is this straw, my fellow 1 Art cold ? I am cold myself. 
Come, your hovel. Come, bring us to this hoveV. 

When that royal edict is obeyed, — when the wonders of the 
magician's art are put in requisition to fulfil it, — when the 
load from the palace to the hovel is laid open, — when the 
hovel, where Tom o' Bedlam is nestling in the straw, is pro- 
duced on the stage, and the King — the King — stoops, 
before all men's eyes, to creep into its mouth, — surely we do 
not need ' a chorus to interpret for us ' — we do not need to 
wait for the Poet's own deferred exposition to seize the more 
obvious meanings. Surely, one catches enough in passing, in 
the dialogues and tableaux here, to perceive that there is 
something going on in this play which is not all play, — 
something that will be earnest, perhaps, ere all is done, — 
something which ' the groundlings' were not expected to get, 
perhaps, in ' their sixe-penn'orth ' of it at the first performance, 
— something which that witty and splendid company, who 
made up the Christinas party at Whitehall, on the occasion of 
its first exhibition there, who sat there ' rustling in silk,' 
breathing perfumes, glittering in wealth that the alchemy of 
the storm had not tried, were not, perhaps, all informed of; 
though there might have been one among them, ' a gentleman 
of blood and breeding,' who could have told them what it meant. 

' We construct/ says the person who describes this method 
of philosophic instruction, speaking of the subtle prepared 
history which forces the inductions — e we construct tables and 



UNACCOMMODATED MAN. 221 

combinations of instances, upon sucli a plan, and in such order, 
that the understanding may be enabled to act upon them/ 

' They told me I was everything.' 

' They told me I was everything ,' says the poor king himself, 
long afterwards, when the storm has had its ultimate effect 
upon him. 

' To say ay and no to everything that I said ! — [To say] ay and no 
too was no good divinity. They told me, I had white hairs in my 
beard, ere the black ones were there. "When the rain came to wet me 
once, and the wind to make me chatter ; when the thunder would not 
peace at my bidding ; there I found them, there I smelt them out. Go 
to, they are not men of their words : they told me I was everything ; 
'tis a lie ; I am not ague-proof? 

1 1 think the king is but a man, as I am ' [says King Hal]. ' All his 
senses have the like conditions ; and his affections, though higher 
mounted, when they stoop, stoop with the like wing? 

But at the door of that rude hut the ruined majesty pauses. 
In vain his loving attendants, whom, for love's sake, this Poet 
will still have with him, entreat him to enter. Storm-battered, 
and wet, and shivering as he is, he shrinks back from the 
shelter he has bid them bring him to. He will not ' in. 
Why? Is it because ' the tempest will not give him leave to 
ponder on things would hurt him more.' That is his excuse 
at first; but another blast strikes him, and he yields to ' the to 
and fro conflicting wind and rain/ and says — 

< But I'll go in.' 

Yet still he pauses. Why? Because he has not told us 
why he is there ; — because he is in the hands of the Poet of 
the Human Kind, the poet of ' those common things that our 
ordinary life consisteth of,' who will have of them an argument 
that shall shame that ' resplendent and lustrous mass of matter' 
that old philosophers and poets have chosen for theirs; — 
because the rare accident — the wild, poetic, unheard-of acci- 
dent — which has brought a man, old in luxuries, clothed in 
soft raiment, nurtured in king's houses, into this rude, unaided 



222 LEAK'S PHILOSOPHER. 

collision with nature; — the poetic impossibility, which has 
brought the one man from the apex of the social structure, 
down this giddy depth, to this lowest social level; — the acci- 
dent which has given the 'one man,' who has the divine 
disposal of the common weal, this little casual experimental 
taste of the weal which his wisdom has been able to provide 
for the many — of the weal which a government so divinely 
ordered, from its pinnacle of personal ease and luxury, thinks 
sufficient and divine enough for the many, — this accident — 
this grand poetic accident — with all its exquisite poetic effects, 
is, in this poet's hands, the means, not the end. This poor 
king's great tragedy, the loss of his social position, his broken- 
heartedness, his outcast suffering, with all the aggravations of 
this poetic descent, and the force of its vivid contrasts- — with 
all the luxurious impressions on the sensibilities which the 
ideal wonders of the rude old fable yield so easily in this Poet's 
hands, — this rare accident, and moving marvel of poetic cala- 
mity,— this 'one man's' tragedy is not the tragedy that this 
Poet's soul is big with. It is the tragedy of the Many, and 
not the One, — it is the tragedy that is the rule, and not the 
exception, — it is the tragedy that is common, and not that 
which is singular, whose argument this Poet has undertaken 



to manage. 



' Come, bring us to your hovel.' 



The royal command is obeyed ; and the house of that estate, 
which has no need to borrow its title of plurality to establish 
the grandeur of its claim, springs up at the New Magician's 
word, and stands before us on the scientific stage in its colossal, 
portentous, scientific grandeur; and the king — the king — is 
at the door of it: the Monarch is at the door of the Many. 
For the scientific Poet has had his eye on that structure, and 
he will make of it a thing of wonder, that shall rival old 
poets' fancy pieces, and drive our entomologists and concholo- 
gists to despair, and drive them off the stage with their cu- 
riosities and marvels. There is no need of a Poet's going to 
the supernatural for ' machinery,' this Poet thinks, while 



UNACCOMMODATED MAN. 223 

there's such machinery as this ready to his hands unemployed. 
'There's something in this more than natural, if philosophy 
could find it out.' There's no need of going to the antique 
for his models ; for he is inventing the arts that will make of 
this an antiquity. 

The Monarch has found his meanest subject's shelter, but at 
the door of it he is arrested — nailed with a nail fastened by 
the Master of Assemblies. He has come down from that 
dizzy height, on the Poet's errand. He is there to speak the 
Poet's word, — to illustrate that grave abstract learning which 
the Poet has put on another page, with a note that, as it stands 
there, notwithstanding the learned airs it has, it is not learning, 
but s the husk and shell ' of it. For this is the philosopher 
who puts it down as a primary Article of Science, that 
governments should be based on a scientific acquaintance with 
' the natures, dispositions, necessities and discontents of the 
people') and though in his book of the Advancement of 
Learning, he suggests that these points ' ought to be, 1 con- 
sidering the means of ascertaining them at the disposal of the 
government, ' considering the variety of its intelligences, the 
wisdom of its observations, and the height of the station 
where it keeps sentinel, transparent as crystal,' — here he puts 
the case of a government that had not availed itself of those 
extraordinary means of ascertaining the truth at a distance, 
and was therefore in the way of discovering much that was 
new, in the course of an accidental personal descent into the 
lower and more inaccessible regions of the Common Weal it 
had ordered. This is the crystal which proves after all the 
most transparent for him. This is the help for weak eyes 
which becomes necessary sometimes, in the absence of the 
scientific crystal, which is its equivalent. 

The Monarch is at the hovel's door, but he cannot enter. 
Why? Because he is in that school into which his own wise 
Regan, that ' counsels' so i well ' — that Regan who sat at his 
own council-table so long, has turned him ; and it is a school 
in which the lessons must be learned ' by heart,' and there is 
no shelter for him from its pitiless beating in this Poet's 



224 LEAR S PHILOSOPHER. 

economy, till that lesson lie was sent there to learn has been 
learned; and it was a Monarch's lesson, and at the Hovel's 
door he must recite it. He will not enter. Why ? Because 
the great lesson of state has entered his soul: with the sharp- 
ness of its illustration it has 'pierced him: his spirit is dilated, 
and moved and kindling with its grandeur: he is thinking of 
' the Many,' he has forgotten ' the One,' — the many, all whose 
senses have like conditions, whose affections stoop with the 
like wing. He will not enter, because he thinks it unregal, 
inhuman, mean, selfish to engross the luxury of the hovel's 
shelter, and the warmth of the ' precious' straw, while lie 
knows that he has subjects still abroad with senses like his 
own, capable of the like misery, still exposed to its merciless 
cruelties. It was the tenant of the castle, it was the man in 
the house who said, ' Come, let's be snug and cheery here. 
Shut up the door. Let's have a fire, and a feast, and a song, — 
or a psalm, or a prayer, as the case may be; only let it be 
within — no matter which it is' : 

' Shut up your doors, my lord; 'tis a wild night, — 
My Regan counsels well ; come out o' the storm.' 

But here it is the houseless man, who is thinking of his 
kindred, — his royal family, for whom God has made him re- 
sponsible, out in this same storm unbonneted; and in the 
tenderness of that sympathy, in the searching delicacy of that 
feeling with which he scrutinizes now their case, they seem to 
him less able than himself to resist its elemental c tyranny? 
For in that ideal revolution — in that exact turn of the wheel 
of fortune — in that experimental ' change of places,' which 
the Poet recommends to those who occupy the upper ones in 
the social structure, as a means of a more particular and prac- 
tical acquaintance with the conditions of those for whom they 
legislate, new views of the common natural human relations; 
new views of the ends of social combinations are perpetually 
flashing on him ; for it is the fallen monarch himself, the late 
owner and disposer of the Common Weal, it is this strangely 
philosophic, mysteriously philosophic, king — philosophic as 
that Alfred who was going to succeed him — it is the king 



UNACCOMMODATED MAN. 225 

who is chosen by the Poet as the chief commentator and 
expounder of that new political and social doctrine which the 
action of this play is itself suggesting. 

In that school of the tempest; in that one night's personal 
experience of the misery that underlies the pompous social 
structure, with all its stately splendours and divine pretensions ; 
in that New School of the Experimental Science, the king has 
been taking lessons in the art of majesty. The alchemy of it 
has robbed him of the external adjuncts and ' additions of a 
king,' but the sovereignty of mercy, the divine right of PITY, 
the majesty of the human kindness, the grandeur of the 
common weal, ' breathes through his lips' from the^ Poet's 
heart c like man new made.' 

'■Kent. Good, my lord, enter here. 
Lear. Prytliee, go in thyself. Seek thine own ease. 

. But, I'll go in. 
In, boy, — go first — [To the Fool.] 

You, houseless poverty' • 

He knows the meaning of that phrase now. 

'Nay get thee in. I'll prat, and then I'll sleep.' 

[Fool goes in.] 
'Poor, naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are 
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,' 

There are no empty phrases in this prayer, the critic of it 
may perceive : it is a learned prayer ; the petitioner knows the 
meaning of each word in it : the tempest is the book in which 
he studied it. 

' How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, 
Your looped and windowed raggedness defend you 
From seasons such as these 1 0, I have taken 
Too little care of this. [Hear, hear]. Take physic, Pomp ; [Hear.] 
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, 
That thou mayest shake the superflux to them, 
And show the Heavens more just 1 . 

That is his 'prayer. To minds accustomed to the ceremonial 
of -a religious worship, ' with court holy water in a dry house' 
only, or to those who have never undertaken to compose a 

Q 



226 lear's philosopher. 

prayer for the king and all the royal family at the hovel's 
mouth, and in such immediate proximity to animals of a 
different species, it will not perhaps seem a very pious one. 
But considering that it was understood to have been composed 
during the heathen ages of this realm, and before Christianity 
had got itself so comfortably established as a principle of 
government and social regulations, perhaps it was as good a 
prayer for a penitent king to go to sleep on, as could well be 
invented. Certainly the spirit of Christianity, as it appeared 
in the life of its Founder, at least, seems to be, by a poetic 
anachronism incorporated in it. 

But it is never the custom of this author to leave the dili- 
gent student of his performances in any doubt whatever as to 
his meaning. It is a rule, that everything in the play shall 
speak and reverberate his purpose. He prolongs and repeats 
his burthens, tilf the whole action echoes with them, till ' the 
groves, the fountains, every region near, seem all one mutual 
cry.' He has indeed the Teacher's trick of repetition, but 
then he is ' so rare a wondered teacher/ so rich in magical 
resources, that he does not often lind it necessary to weary the 
sense with sameness. He is prodigal in variety. It is a 
Proteus repetition. But his charge to his Ariel in getting up 
his Masques, always is, — 

' Bring a corollary, 
Rather than want a spirit.' 

Nay, it would be dangerous, not wearisome merely, to make 
the text of this living commentary continuous, or to bring too 
near together ' those short and pithy sentences' wherein ' the 
scanes of meaning' lie packed so closely, which the action 
unwinds and fashions into its immortal groups. And the 
curtain must fall and rise again, ere the outcast duke, — his 
eyes gouged out by tyranny, turned forth to smell his way 
to Dover, — can dare to echo, word by word, the thoughts of 
the outcast king. 

Led by one whose qualification for leadership is, that he 
is ' Madman and Beggar, too,' — for as Gloster explains it to 



UNACCOMMODATED MAN. 227 

us, explaining also at the same time much else that the scenic 
language of the play, the dumb show, the transitory hiero- 
glyphic of it presents, and all the criticism of it, 

' 'T is the Time's Plague when Madmen lead the Blind' — 

groping with such leadership his way to Dover — ' smelling it 
out' — thus it is that his secret understanding with the king, 
in that mad and wondrous philosophical humour of his, betrays 
itself. 

Gloster. Here, take this purse [to Tora o' Bedlam], thou whom the 
heaven's plagues 
Have humbled to all strokes : that I am wretched 
Makes thee the happier : — Heavens, deal so still ! 
Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man 
That slaves your ordinance, that will not see 
Because he doth not peel, feel your power quickly ; 
So distribution shoidd undo excess, 
And each man have enough. 
Lear. I have taken 

Too little care of this. Take physic, Pomp ; 
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, 
That thou may'st shake the superflux to them, 
Andshoiu the Heavens more just. 

Truly, these men would seem to have been taking lessons 
in the same school. But it is very seldom that two men in 
real life, of equal learning on any topic, coincide so exactly in 
their trains of thought, and in the niceties of their expression 
in discussing it. The emphasis is deep, indeed, when this 
author graves his meaning with such a repetition. But Kegan's 
stern school-master is abroad in this play, enforcing the philo- 
sophic subtilties, bringing home to the senses the neglected 
lessons of nature; full of errands to ' wilful men,' charged with 
coarse lessons to those who will learn through the senses only 
great Nature's lore — that ' slave Heaven's ordinance ■ — that 
will not see, because they do not feel.' 



228 leak's philosopher. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE KING AND THE BEGGAR. 

Armado. Is there not a ballad, boy, of the King and the Beggar? 

Moth. The world was very guilty of such a ballad some three ages since : 
but, I think, now 'tis not to be found; or, if it were, it would neither 
serve for the writing, nor for the tune. 

Armado. I will have the subject newly writ over, that I may example my di- 
gression by some mighty precedent. Love's Labour's Lost. 

"OUT the king's philosophical studies are not yet completed; 
*-* for he is in the hands of one who does not rely on 
general statements for his effects; one who is pertinaciously 
bent on exploring those subterranean social depths, that the 
king's prayer has just glanced at — who is determined to lay 
bare to the utmost, to carry the torch of his new science into 
the lowest recess of that wild, nameless mass of human neglect 
and misery, which the regal sympathy has embraced for him 
in the general; though not, indeed, without some niceties of 
detail, which shew that the eye of a true human pity has 
collected the terms in which he expresses it. 

That vast, immeasurable mass of social misery, which has 
no learned speech, no tragic dialect — no, or ' it would bear 
such an emphasis,' that ' its phrase of sorrow might conjure 
the wandering stars, and bid them stand like wonder-wounded 
hearers' — that misery which must get a king's robe about 
it, ere, in the Poet's time, it could have an audience, must 
needs be produced here, ere all this play was played, in its 
own native and proper shape and costume, daring as the 
attempt might seem. 

The author is not satisfied with the picturesque details of 
that misery which he has already given us, with its ' looped 
and windowed raggedness/ its ' houseless head/ its ' unfed 
sides' ; it must be yet more palpably presented. It must be 
embodied and dramatically developed; it must be exhibited 
with its proper moral and intellectual accompaniments, too, 



THE KING AND THE BEGGAR. 229 

before the philosophic requisitions of this design can be 
fulfilled. 

To the lowest deeps of the lowest depths of the unfathomed 
social misery of that time, the new philosopher, the Poet of 
the Advancement of Learning, will himself descend; and 
drag up to the eye of day, — undeterred by any scruple of 
poetic sensibility, — in his own unborrowed habiliments, with all 
the badges of his position in the state upon him, the creature 
he has selected as one of the representatives of the social state 
as he finds it ; — the creature he has selected as the repre- 
sentative of those loathsome, impenetrated masses of human life, 
which the unscientific social state must needs generate."' 

For the design of this play, in its exhibition of the true 
human need, in its new and large exhibition of the ground 
which the Arts of a true and rational human civilization must 
covei*, could not but include the defects of that, which passed 
for civilization then. It involved necessarily, indeed, the 
most searching and relentless criticisms of the existing insti- 
tutions of that time. That cry of social misery which per- 
vades it, in which the natural, and social, and artificial evils 
are still discriminated through all the most tragic bursts of 
of passion — in which the true social need, in all its compre- 
hension, is uttered — that wild cry of human anguish, pro- 
longed, and repeated, and reverberated as it is — is all one 
outcry upon the social wisdom of the Poet's time. It con- 
stitutes one continuous dramatic expression and embodiment of 
that so deeply-rooted opinion which the New Philosopher is 
known to have entertained, in regard to the practical knowledge 
of mankind as he found it; his opinion of the real advances 
towards the true human ends which had been made in his 
time; an opinion which he has, indeed, taken occasion to 
express elsewhere with some distinctness, considering the 
conditions which hampered the expression of his philosophical 
conclusions; but it is one which could hardly have been 
produced from the philosophic chair in his time, or from the 
bench, or at the council-table, in such terms as we find him 
launching out into here, without any fear or scruple. 



230 lear's philosopher. 

For those who persuade themselves that it was any part of 
this player's intention to bring out, for the amusement of his 
audiences, an historical exhibition of the Life and Times of 
that ancient Celtic king of Britain, whose legendary name and 
chronicle he has appropriated so effectively, will be prevented 
by that view of the subject from ever attaining the least 
inkling of the matter here. For this Magician has quite other 
work in hand. He does not put his girdles round the earth, 
and enforce and harass with toil his delicate spirits, — he does 
not get out his book and staff, and put on his Enchanter's 
robe, for any such kind of effect as that. For this is not any 
antiquary at all, but the true Prospero; and when a little 
more light has been brought into his cell, his garments will 
be found to be, like the disguised Edgar's — ' Persian.' 

It is not enough, then, in the wild revolutionary sweep 
of this play, to bring out the monarch from his palace, and set 
him down at the hovel's door. It is not enough to open it, 
and shew us, by the light of Cordelia's pity — that sunshine 
and rain at once — the ' swine' in that human dwelling, and 
' the short and musty-straw' there. For the poet himself will 
enter it, and drag out its living human tenant into the day of 
his immortal verse. He will set him up for all ages, on his 
great stage, side by side with his great brother. He will put 
the feet of these two men on one platform, and measure their 
stature — for all their senses have the like conditions, as we 
have heard already ; and he will make the king himself own 
the KINDRED, and interpret for him. For this group must 
needs be completed ' to the eye' ; these two extremes in the 
social scale must meet and literally embrace each other, before 
this Teacher's doctrine of ' MAN ' — ' man as distinguished 
from other species' — can be artistically exhibited. For it is 
this picture of the unaccommodated man — 'unaccommodated' 
still, with all his empiric arts, with all his wordy philosophy — 
it is this picture of man ' as he is,' in the misery of his 
IGNORANCE, in his blind struggle with his law of kind, which 
is his law of ' being,' — unreconciled to his place in the universal 
order, where he must live or have no life — for the beast,' 



THE KING AND THE BEGGAR. 23 1 

obedient to his law, rejects from his kinds the degenerate man 
— it is this vivid, condensed, scientific exhibition, this scientific 
collection of the fact of man as he is, in his empiric struggle 
Avith the law which universal nature enforces, and will 
enforce on him with all her pains and penalties till he learns 
it — it is this ' negation' which brings out the true doctrine of 
man and human society in this method of inquiry. For the 
scientific method begins with negations and exclusions, and 
concludes only after every species of rejection; the other, the 
common method, which begins with ' affirmation,' is the 
one that has failed in practice, the one which has brought 
about just this state of things which science is undertaking to 
reform. 

But this levelling, which the man of the new science, with 
his new apparatus, with his ( globe and his machines,' con- 
trives to exhibit here with so much 'facility,' is a scientific 
one, designed to answer a scientific purpose merely. The 
experimenter, in this case, is one who looks with scientific fore- 
bodings, and not with hope only, on those storms of violent 
political revolution that were hanging then on the world's 
horizon, and threatening to repeat this process, threatening to 
overwhelm in their wild crash, all the ancient social structures 
— threatening ' to lay all flat' ! That is not the kind of change 
he meditates. His is the subtle, all-penetrating Eadicalism of 
the New Science, which imitates the noiseless processes of 
Nature in its change and Re-formation. 

There is a wild gibberish heard in the straw. The fool 
shrieks, ' Nuncle, come not in here,' and out rushes ' Tom 
o'Bedlam^ — ■ the naked creature, as Gloster calls him — with 
his ' elf locks,' his ' blanketed loins,' his ' begrimed face/ with 
his shattered wits, his madness, real or assumed — there he 
stands. 

We know, indeed, in this instance, that there is gentle, 
nay, noble blood, there, under that horrid guise. It is the 
heir of a dukedom, we are told, but an out-cast one, who has 
found himself compelled, for the sake of prolonging life, to 
assume that shape, as other wretches were in the Poet's time 



232 leak's philosopher. 

for that same purpose, — men who had lost their dukedoms, 
too, as it would seem, such as they were, in some way, and 
their human relationships, too. But notwithstanding this 
alleviating circumstance which enables the audience to endure 
the exhibition in this instance, it serves not the less effectually 
in the Poet's hand, as ' the conspicuous instance' of that 
lowest human condition which this grand Social Tragedy 
must needs include in its delineations. 

Here are some of the prose English descriptions of this 
creature, which we find already included in the commentaries 
on this tragedy; and which shew that the Poet has not exag- 
gerated his portrait, and that it is not by way of celebrating 
any Anglo-Saxon or Norman triumph over the barbarisms of 
the joint reigns of Regan and Goneril, that he is produced 
here. 

' I remember, before the civil wars, Tom o' Bedlams went 
about begging,' Aubrey says. Randle Holme, in his ' Academy 
of Arms and Blazon,' includes them in his descriptions, as a 
class of vagabonds ' feigning themselves mad.' ( The Bedlam 
is in the same garb, with a long staff,' etc., ' but his cloathing 
is more fantastic and ridiculous; for being a madman, he is 
madly decked and dressed all over with rubans, feathers, cuttings 
of cloth, and what not, to make him seem a madman, when he 
is no other than a dissembling knave.' 

In the Bellman of London, 1640, there is another description 
of him — ' He sweares he hath been in Bedlam, and will talk 
frantickely of purpose ; you see pinnes stuck in sundry places of 
his naked jiesh, especially in his armes, which paine he gladly puts 
himself e to; calls himself by the name of Poore Tom; and 
coming near anybody, cries out, ' Poor Tom's a cold.'' Of these 
Abraham men, some be exceeding merry, and doe nothing but 
sing songs, fashioned out of their own braines; some will 
dance; others will doe nothing but either laugh or weepe ; 
others are dogged, and so sullen, both in looke and speech, that 
spying but a small company in a house, they bluntly and 
boldly enter, compelling the servants, through fear, to give 
them what they demand.' 



THE KING AND THE BEGGAR. 233 

This seems very wicked, very depraved, on the part of these 
persons, especially the sticking of pins in their bare arms; but 
even our young dukeling Edgar pays — 

' "While I may scape, 
I will preserve myself : and am bethought 
To take the basest and most poorest shape, 
That ever penury, in contempt of man, 
Brought near to beast : my face I'll grime with filth ; 
Blanket my loins ; elf all nay hair in knots ; 
•And with presented nakedness outface 
The winds, and persecutions of the sky. 
The country gives me proof and precedent 
Of Bedlam beggars, who, with roaring voices, 
Strike in their numVd and mortified bare arms, 
Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary ; 
And with this horrible object, from low farms, 
Poor pelting villages, sheep-cotes and mills, 
Sometime ivith lunatic bans, sometime with prayers, 
Enforce their charity. — 'Poor Turlygood !' 'poor Tom !' 
Thats something yet. Edgar I nothing ami 

But the poet is not contented with the minuteness of this 
description. This character appears to have taken his eye as 
completely as it takes King Lear's, the moment that lie gets a 
glimpse of him; and the poet betrays throughout that same 
philosophical interest in the study, which the monarch expresses 
so boldly; for beside the dramatic exhibition, and the philo- 
sophical review of him, which King Lear institutes, here is 
an autographical sketch of him, and of his mode of living — 

' What are you there ? Your names V 

cries Gloster, when he comes to the heath, with his torch, to 
seek out the king and his party; whereupon Tom, thinking 
that an occasion has now arrived for denning his social outline, 
takes it upon him to answer, for his part — 

' Poor Tom ; that eats the swimming frog, the toad, the tadpole, the 
wall-newt, and the water-[newt] ; that in the fury of his heart, when 
the foul fiend rages, swallows the old rat, and the ditch-dog ; drinks the 
green mantle of the standing pool ; who is whipped from tything to 
tything ' [this is an Anglo-Saxon institution one sees] ; ' and stocked, 



234 leak's philosopher. 

punished, and imprisoned ; who hath had three suits to his back ' 
[fallen fortunes here, too], ' six shirts to his body, horse to ride, and 
weapon to wear.' 

The Jesuits had been, then, recently and notoriously at 
work in England, endeavouring professedly to cast out ' the 
fiend'' from many possessed persons; and it appeared, to this 
great practical philosopher, that this creature he has fetched 
up here from the subterranean social abysses of his time, pre- 
sented a very fitting subject for the operations of practitioners 
professing any miraculous or superior influence over the demons 
that infest human nature, or those that have power over 
human fortunes. He has brought him out here thus dis-. 
tinctly, for the purpose of inquiring whether there is any 
exorcism which can meet his case, or that of the great human 
multitude, that no man can number, of whose penury and vice 
he stands here as the elected, pre-eminent, royal representative. 
In that survey and report of human affairs, which this author 
felt himself called upon to make, the case of this poor creature 
had attracted his attention, and appeared to him to require 
looking to; and, accordingly, he has made a note of it. 

He is admirably seconded in his views on this subject, by the 
king himself, who, in that fine philosophic humour which his 
madness and his misery have served to develop in him, stands 
ready to lend himself to the boldest and most delicate philo- 
sophical inquiries. For the point to be noted here, — and it 
is one of no ordinary importance, — is, that this mad humour 
for philosophical investigation, which has seized so strangely 
the royal mind, does not appear to be at all in the vein of 
that old-fashioned philosophy, which had been rattling its ab- 
stractions in the face of the collective human misery for so 
many ages. For the helplessness of the human creature in his 
struggle with the elements, and those conditions of his nature 
which put him so hopelessly at the mercy of his own kind and 
kindred, seem to suggest to the royal sufferer, who has the 
advantage of a fresh experience to stimulate his apprehension, 
that there ought to be some relief for the human condition 
from this source, that is, from PHILOSOPHY; and his inquiries 



THE KING AND THE BEGGAR. 235 

and discoveries are all stamped with the unmistakeable impress 
of that fire neAV philosophy, which was not yet out of the 
mint elsewhere — which was yet undergoing the formative 
process in the mind of its great inventor ; — that philosophy, 
which we are told elsewhere f has for its principal object, to 
make nature subservient to the wants and state of Man ' ; — and 
which concerns itself for that purpose with ideas as they exist 
in nature, as causes, and not as they exist in the mind of man 
as ivords merely. 

If there had been, indeed, any intention of paying a marked 
compliment to the philosophy which still held all the mind 
of the world in its grasp, at that great moment in history, in 
which Tom o' Bedlam makes his first appearance on any stage, 
it is not likely that that sage would have been just the person 
appointed to hold the office of Philosopher in Chi<>f, and 
Councillor extraordinary to his Majesty. 

The selection is indeed made on the part of the king, 
in perfect good faith, whatever the Poet's intent may be; for 
from the moment that this creature makes his appearance, he 
has no eyes or ears for anything else. And he will not be 
parted from him. For this startling juxtaposition was not 
intended by the Poet to fulfil its effect as a mere passing 
tableau vivant. The relation must be dramatically developed ; 
that astounding juxtaposition must be prolonged, in spite of 
the horror of the spectators, and the disgust and rude dis- 
pleasure of the king's attendants. They seek in vain to part 
these two men. The king refuses to stir without him. ' He 
will still keep with his philosopher? He has a vague idea that 
his regal administration stands in need of some assistance, and 
that philosophy ought to. be able to give it, and that the Bed- 
lamite is in some way connected with the subject, but confused 
as the association is, it is a pertinacious one; and, in spite of 
their disgust the king's friends are obliged to take this wretch 
with them. For Gloster does not know, after all, it is 'his own 
flesh and blood' he sees there. He cannot even recognize the 
common kindred in that guise, as the king does, when he 
philosophises on his condition. And the rough aristocratic 



236 lear's philosopher. 

contempt and indifference which is manifested by the king's 
party, as a matter of course, for this poor human victim of 
wrong and misfortune, is made to contrast with their bound- 
less sympathy and tenderness for the king, while the poet, 
aiming at broader relationships, finds the mantle of his human- 
ity wide enough for them, both. 

As for the king, — startled in the midst of those new views of 
human wretchedness which his own sufferings have occa- 
sioned, and while those desires to remedy it, with which his 
penitence is accompanied, are still on his lip, by this wild 
apparition and embodiment of his thought, in that new acces- 
sion of his mental disorder, which the presence of this object 
seems to occasion, that confounding of proximate conceptions, 
which leads him to regard this man as a source of new light 
on human affairs, is one of those exquisite physiological 
exhibitions of which only this scientific artist is capable. 

And, in fact, it must be confessed, that this ' learned Theban' 
himself, notwithstanding the unexpected dignity of his pro- 
motion, does not appear to be altogether wanting in a taste, at 
least, for that new kind of philosophical investigation, which 
seems to be looked for at his hands. The king's inquiries 
appear to fall in remarkably with the previous train of his 
pursuits. In the course of his experiments, he seems himself 
to have struck upon that new philosophic proceeding, which 
has been called ' putting philosophy upon the right road 
again.' 

Only the philosophic domain which that new road in philo- 
sophy leads to, appears to be very considerably broader, as 
' Tom ' takes it, than that very vivid, but narrow limitation of 
its fields, which Mr. Macaulay has set down in our time, 
would make it. Indeed, this ' philosopher,' that Lear so much 
inclines to, appears to have included in his investigations the 
two extremes of the new science of practice. He has sounded 
it apparently ' from its lowest note to the top of its key.' 

' What is your study ? ' says the king to him, eyeing him 
curiously, and apparently struck with the practical result — 
anxious to have a word with him in private, but obliged to 
conduct the examination on the stage. 



THE KING AND THE BEGGAR. 237 

1 How to prevent the fiend,' is Tom's reply. ' How to 
prevent the fiend and to kill vermin/ 

This is the Poet who says elsewhere, ' that without good 
nature, men are themselves but a nobler kind of vermin.' 

One cannot but observe, however, that Poor Tom's 
researches in this quite new field of a practical philosophy, do 
not appear to have been followed up since his time with any 
very marked success. One of these departments of ' his study' 
has indeed been seized, and is now occupied by whole troops 
of modern philosophers; but their inquiries, though very in- 
teresting and doubtlessly useful, do not appear to exhibit that 
direct and palpable bearing on practice, to which Tom's pro- 
gramme so severely inclines. For he is one who would make 
' the art and practic part of life, the mistress to his theoric' 
And as to that other mysterious object of his inquiries, 
Mr. Macaulay is not the only person who appears to think, 
that that does not come within the range of anything human. 
Many of our scholars are still of the opinion that, ' court holy 
water' is the best application in the world for him ; and the fact 
that he does not appear to get 'prevented' with it; it is a fact 
which of course has nothing to do with the logical result. 
For out philosophers are still determined to reason it ' thus and 
thus,' without taking into account the circumstance, that e the 
sequent effect' with which ' nature finds itself scourged/ is not 
touched by their reasons. 

King Lear's own inquiries seem also to include with great 
distinctness, the two great branches of the new philosophical 
inquiry. His mind is indeed very eagerly bent on the pursuit 
of causes. And though in the paroxysms of his mental dis- 
order, he is apt to confound them occasionally, this very con* 
fusion, as it is managed, only serves to develop the breadth of 
the philosophic conception beneath it. 

' He hath no daughters, Sir.' ' Death, traitor! Nothing 
could have subdued nature to such a lowness, but — his UN- 
KIND daughters' It is, of course, his own new and terrible 
experience which points the inquiry, and though the physical 
causes are not omitted in it, it is not strange that the moral 



238 leak's philosopher. 

should predominate, and that his mind should seem to be very 
curiously occupied in tracking the ethical phenomena to their 
sources ' in nature? 

In the midst of the uproar of the Tempest, he does indeed 
begin with the physical investigation. He puts to his c learned 
Theban' the question, which no learned Theban had then 
ever suspected of lying within the range of the scholar's 
investigations — that question which has been put to some 
purpose since — ( What is the cause of thunder ? ' But his 
philosophic inquiry does not stop there, — where all the new 
philosophy has stopped ever since, and where some of our 
scholars declare it was meant to stop, notwithstanding the 
plainest declarations of its inventor to the contrary — with the 
investigation of physical causes. 

For, after all, it is ' the tempest in his mind' that most con- 
cerns him. His philosopher, his practical philosopher, must 
be able to explore the conditions of that, and find the con- 
ductors for its lightnings. ' For where the greater malady is 
fixed, the lesser is scarce felt.' ' Nor rain, wind, thunder, 
fire, are his daughters.' After all, it is Megan's heart that 
appears to him to be the trouble — it is that which must first 
be laid on the table; and as soon as he decides to have a 
philosopher among ' his hundred,' he gives orders to that 
effect. 

' Then let them anatomise Regan ; see what breeds about her heart : 
Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts T 

A very fair subject for philosophical inquiry, one would say; 
and, on the whole, as profitable and interesting a one, per- 
haps, as some of those that engage the attention of our men of 
learning so profoundly at present. In these days of enlightened 
scientific procedure, one would hardly undertake the smallest 
practical affair with the aid of any such vague general notions 
or traditional accounts of the properties to be dealt with, as 
those which our learned Thebans appear to find all-sufficient 
for their practices, in that particular department which Lear 
seems inclined to open here as a field for scientific exploration. 



THE KING AND THE BEGGAR. 239 

And it is perfectly clear that the author, whoever he 
may be, is very much of Lear's mind on this point, for he 
does not depend upon Lear alone to suggest his views 
upon it. There is never a person of this drama that does not 
do it. 



240 lear's philosopher. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE USE OF EYES. 

' All that follow their noses are led by their eyes, but — blind men.' 

npHE Play is all strewn throughout, and tinctured in the 
grain, with the finest natural philosophy, of that new 
and very subtle and peculiar kind, which belongs to the earlier 
stages of the physical inquiry, and while it was still in the 
hands of its original inventors. Even in physics, there are 
views here which have not been developed any further since 
this author's time. It is not merely in the direct discourse on 
questions of physical science, as in the physician's report of 
the resources of his art, or in Cordelia's invocation to ' all the 
blessed secrets — the unpublished virtues of the earth,' that the 
track of the new physiological science, which this work 
embodies, may be seen. It runs through it all; it betrays 
itself at every turn. But the subtle and occult relations of 
the moral and physical are noted here, as we do not find them 
noted elsewhere, in less practical theories of nature. 

That there is something in the design of this play which 
requires an elaborate and systematic exhibition of the ' special' 
human relationships, natural and artificial, political, social, and 
domestic, almost any reading of it would show. And that 
this design involves, also, a systematic exhibition of the social 
consequences arising from the violation of the natural laws or 
duties of these relationships, and that this violation is every- 
where systematically aggravated, — carried to its last con- 
ceivable extreme, so that all the play is filled with the uproar 



THE USE OF EYES. 241 

of one continued outrage on humanity ; this is not less evident 
For the Poet is not content with the material which his 
chronicle offered him, already invented to his hands for this 
purpose, but he has deliberately tacked to it, and intricately 
connected with it throughout, another plot, bearing on the 
surface of it, and in the most prominent statements, the 
author's intention in this respect; which tends not only in the 
most unequivocal manner to repeat and corroborate the im- 
pressions which the story of Lear produces, but to widen the 
dramatic exhibition, so as to make it capable of conveying the 
whole breadth of the philosophic conception. For it is the 
scientific doctrine of MAN that is taught here; and that is, 
that man must be human in all his relations, or ' cease to be.' 
It is the violation of the essential humanity. It is a 
degeneracy which is exhibited here, and the ' SEQUENT 
effects' which belong naturally to the violation of a law 
that has the force of the universe to sustain it. And it is not 
by accident that the story of the illegitimate Edmund begins 
the piece ; it is not for nothing that we are compelled to stop 
to hear that, before even Lear and his daughters can make 
their entrance. The whole story of the base and base-born one, 
who makes what he calls nature — the rude, brutal, sponta- 
neous nature — his goddess and his law, and ignores the 
human distinction; this part was needed in order to supply 
the deficiences in the social diagrams which the original plot 
presented; and, indeed, the whole story of the Duke of 
Gloster, which is from first to last a clear Elizabethan inven- 
tion, and of which this of Edmund is but a part, was not less 
essential for the same purpose. 

Neither does one need to go very far beneath the surface, to 
perceive a new and extraordinary treatment of the ethical 
principle in this play throughout; one which the new, artistic, 
practical ' stand-point ' here taken naturally suggested, but one 
which could have proceeded only from the inmost heart of the 
new philosophy. It is just the kind of treatment which the 
proposal to introduce the Inductive method of inquiry into 
this department of the human practice inevitably involved. 

R 



242 LEAR'S philosophek. 

A disposition to go behind the ethical phenomena, to pursue 
the investigation to its scientific conclusion, a refusal to accept 
the facts which, to the unscientific observation, appear to be 
the ultimate ones — a refusal to accept the coarse, vague, 
spontaneous notions of the dark ages, as the solution of these 
so essential phenomena, is everywhere betraying and declaring 
itself. Cordelia's agonised invocation and summons to the 
unpublished forces of nature, to be aidant and remediate to the 
good man's distress, is continually echoed by the poet, but 
with a broader application. It is not the bodily malady and in- 
firmity only — it is not that kind of madness, only with which 
the poor king is afflicted in the later stages of the play, which 
appears to him to need scientific treatment — it is not for the cure 
of these alone that he would open his Prospero book, ' nature's 
infinite book of secresy,' as he calls it in Mark Antony — 'the 
true magic,' as he calls it elsewhere — the book of the un- 
published laws — the scientific book of ' KINDS ' — the book 
of ' the historic laws ' — ' the book of God's power.' 

All the interior phenomena which attend the violation of 
duty are strictly omitted here. That psychological exhibition 
of it belongs to other plays; and the Poet has left us, as we 
all know, no room to suspect the tenderness of his moral sen- 
sibility, or the depth of his acquaintance with these subjective 
phenomena. The social consequences of the violation of duty 
in all the human relationships, the consequence to others, and 
the social reaction, limits the exhibition here. The object on 
which our sympathies are chiefly concentrated is, as he himself 
is made to inform us — 

' One more shmed against, than sinning.' 
' Oh these eclipses do poi'tend these divisions,' 

says the base-born Edmund, sneeringly. ' Fa sol la mij he 
continues, producing that particular conjunction of sounds 
which was forbidden by the ancient musicians, on account of 
its unnatural discord. The monkish writers on music call it 
diabolical. It is at the conclusion of a very long and elaborate 
discussion on this question, that he treats us to this prohibited 
piece of harmony; and a discussion in which Gloster refers to 



THE USE OF EYES. 243 

the influence of the planets, this unnaturalness in all the human 
relations — this universal jangle — 'this ruinous disorder, that 
hunts men disquietly to their graves.' But the 'base' Edmund 
is disposed to acquit the celestial influences of the evil charged 
on them. He does not believe in men being — 

' Fools, by heavenly compulsion ; knaves and thieves, by spherical 
predominance ; drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedi- 
ence of planetary influence ; and all that they are evil in, by a divine 
thrusting on.' 

He has another method of accounting for "what he himself is. 
He does not think it necessary to go quite so far, to find the 
origin of his own base, lawless, inhuman, unconscionable dispo- 
sitions. But the inquiries, which are handled so boldly in the 
soliloquies of Edmund, are started again and again elsewhere; 
and the recurrence is too emphatic, to leave any room to doubt 
that the author's intention in the play is concerned in it; and 
that this question of ' the several dispositions and characters of 
men,' and the inquiry as to whether there be ' any causes in 
nature' of these degenerate tendencies, which he is at such pains 
to exhibit, is, for some reason or other, a very important point 
with him. That which in contemplative philosophy corresponds 
to the cause, in practical philosophy becomes the rule, the founder 
of it tells us. But the play cannot be studied effectually without 
taking into account the fact, that the author avails himself of 
the date of his chronicle to represent that stage of human 
development in which the mysterious forces of nature were still 
blindly deified; and, therefore, the religious invocations with 
which the play abounds, are not, in the modern sense of the 
term, prayers, but only vague, poetic appeals to the unknown, 
unexplored powers in nature, which we call second causes. 
And when, as yet, there was no room for science in the narrow 
premature theories which men found imposed on them — when 
all the new movement of human thought was still ham- 
pered by the narrowness of ' preconceived opinions,' the poet 
was glad to take shelter under the date of his legend now and 
then, here, as in Macbeth and other poems, for the sake of a 

r 2 



244 LEAR S PHILOSOPHER. 

little more freedom in this respect. He is very far from con- 
demning 'presuppositions ' and ' anticipations? but only wishes 
them kept in their proper places, because to bring them into 
the region of fact and induction, and so to falsify the actual 
condition of things — to undertake to face down the powers of 
nature with them, is a merely mistaken mode of proceeding; 
because these powers are powers which do not yield to the 
human beliefs, and the practical doctrine must have respect to 
them. The great battle of that age — the battle of the 
second causes, which the new philosophers were compelled 
to fight in behalf of humanity at the peril of their lives 
— the battle which they fought in the open field with 
Aristotle and Plato — fills all this magnificent poetry with its 
reverberations. 

It must be confessed, that those terrible appeals to the 
heavens, into which King Lear launches out in his anguish 
now and then, are anything but pious; but the boldness which 
shocks our modern sensibilities becomes less offensive, if we 
take into account the fact that they are not made to the 
object of our present religious worship, but are mere vague 
appeals, and questioning addresses to the unknown, unexplored 
causes in nature — the powers which lie behind the historical 
phenomena. 

For that divine Ideal of Human Nature to which ' our 
large temples, crowded with the shows of peace/ are built 
now, had not yet appeared at the date of this history, in that 
form in which we now worship it, with its triumphant assu- 
rance that it came forth from the heart of God, and declared 
Him. Paul had not yet preached his sermon at Athens, in 
the age of this supposed King of Britain; and though the 
author was indeed painting his own age, and not that, it so 
happened that there was such a heathenish and inhuman, and, 
as he intimates, indeed, quite ' fiendish 1 and diabolical state of 
things to represent here then, that this discrepancy was not so 
shocking as it might have been if he had found a divine 
religion in full operation here. 

' If it be you,' says Lear, falling back upon the theory, 



THE USE OP EYES. 245 

which Edmund has already discarded, of a divine thrusting 
on — 

' If it be you that stir these daughters' hearts 
Against their father, fool me not so much 
To bear it tamely ; touch me with noble anger.' 

And here is an echo of the ' spherical predominance' which 
Gloster goes into so elaborately in the outset, confessing, much 
to the amusement of his graceless offspring, that he is disposed 
to think, after all, there may be something in it. c For,' he 
says, ' though the wisdom of nature [the spontaneous wisdom] 
can reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself scourged 
by the sequent EFFECT ;' and he is talking under the dic- 
tation of a philosopher who, though he ridicules the preten- 
sions of astrology in the next breath lays it down as a principle 
in the scientific Art, as a chief point in the science of Practice 
and Kelief, that the sequent effects, with which nature finds 
itself scourged, are a better guide to the causes which" the 
practical remedy must comprehend, than anything which the 
wisdom of nature can undertake to reason out beforehand, 
without any respect to the sequent effect — ' thus, and — thus? 
But here is the confirmation of Gloster's view of the subject, 
which the sound-minded Kent, who is not at all metaphysical, 
finds himself provoked to utter; and though this is in the 
Fourth Act, and Gloster's opinions are advanced in the First, 
the passages do, notwithstanding, ' look towards each other.' 

' It is the stars. 
The stars above us govern our conditions, 
Else one self mate and mate could not beget 
Such different issues.' 

Of course, it is not the astrological theory of the constitu- 
tional original differences in the human dispositions which the 
honest Kent is made to advocate here, literally and in earnest. 
It is rather the absence of any known cause, and the necessity 
of supposing one in a case where this difference is so obtrusive 
and violent, which he expresses; the stars being the natural 
resort of men in such circumstances, and when other solutions 
fail ; though Poor Tom appears to be in possession of a much 



246 lear's philosopher. 

more orthodox theory for the peculiar disorders in his moral 
constitution : but, at the same time, it must be conceded that 
it is one which does not appear to have led, in his case, to any- 
such felicitous practical results as the supposed origin of it 
might have seemed to promise. 

For, indeed, this point of natural differences in the human 
dispositions, though, of course, quite overlooked in the moral 
regimen which is based on a priori knowledge, and is able to 
dispense with science, and ride over the actual laws; this 
point of difference — not in the dispositions of individuals 
only, but the differences which manifest themselves under the 
varying conditions of age and bodily health, of climate, or 
other physical differences in the same individual, as well as 
under the varying moral conditions of differing social and 
political positions and relations; this so essential point, over- 
looked as it is in the ordinary practice, has seized the clear 
eye of this great scientific practitioner, this Master of Arts, 
and he is making a radical point of it in his new speculation; 
he is making collections on it, and he will make a main point 
of it in ' the part operative ' of his New Science, when he 
comes to make out the outline of it elsewhere, referring us 
distinctly to this place for his collections in it, for his collec- 
tions on this point, as well as on others not less radical. 

Lear himself, in his madness, appears, as we have seen 
already, much disposed to speculate upon this same particular 
question, which Gloster and Edmund and Kent have already 
indicated as 'a necessary question of the play'; namely, the 
question as to ' the causes in nature' of the phenomena which 
the social condition of man exhibits; that is, the causes of that 
degeneracy, that violation of the essential human law to which 
all the evil is tracked here; and it is the scientific doctrine, 
that the nature of a thing cannot be successfully studied in 
itself alone. It is not in water or in air only, or in any other 
single substance, that we find the nature of oxygen, or hydrogen, 
or any other of those principles in nature, which the applica- 
tion of this method to another department evolves from things 
which present themselves to the unscientific experience as 



THE USE OF EYES. 247 

most dissimilar. ' It is the greatest proof of want of skill to 
investigate the nature of any object in itself alone; for the 
same nature which seems concealed and hidden in some in- 
stances, is manifest and almost palpable in others; and, in 
general, those very things which are considered as secret, are 
manifest and common in other objects, but will never be 
clearly seen if the experiments and conclusions of men be 
directed to themselves alone': for it is a part of this doctrine, 
that man is not omitted in the order of nature — that the term 
HUMAN NATURE is not a misnomer. The doctrine of this 
Play is, that those same powers which are at work in man's 
life, are at work without it also ; that they are powers which 
belong, in their highest form, to the nature of things in 
general; and that man himself, with all his special distinc- 
tions, is under the law of that universal constitution. The 
scientific remedy for the state of things which this play ex- 
hibits is the knowledge of ' causes in nature,' which must be 
found here, as in the other case, by scientific investigation — 
the spontaneous method leading to no better result here than 
in the other case. Under cover of the excitements of this 
play, this inquiry is boldly opened, and the track of the new 
science is clearly marked in it. 

Poor Lear is, indeed, compelled to leave the practical im- 
provement of his hints for another; and when it comes to the 
open question of the remedy for this state of things, which is 
the term of the inquiry, when he undertakes to put his 
absolute power in motion for the avowed purpose of effecting 
an improvement here, he appears indeed disposed to treat the 
subject in the most savage and despairing manner — that is, 
on his own account ; but the vein- of the scientific inquiry still 
runs unbroken through all this burst of passion. For in his 
scorn for that failure in human nature and human life of 
which society, as he finds it, stands convicted — that failure 
to establish the distinctive law of the human kind — that 
failure from which he is suffering so deeply — and in his 
struggle to express that disgust, he proposes, as an improve- 
ment on the state of things he finds, a law which shall oblite- 



248 leak's philosophee. 

rate that human distinction ; though certainly that is anything 
but the Poet's remedy; and the poor king himself does not 
appear to be in earnest, for the moral disgust in which the 
distinctive sentiment of the nobler nature, and the knowledge 
of human good and evil betrays itself, breaks forth in floods of 
passion that overflow all the bounds of articulation before he 
can make an end of it. 

But the radical nature of this question of natural causes, 
which the practical theory of the social arts must comprehend, 
is already indicated in this play, in the very beginning of the 
action. 

This author is everywhere bent on graving the scientific 
distinction between those instinctive affections in which men 
degenerate, and tend to the rank of lower natures, and the 
noble natural, distinctively human affections; and when, in 
the first scene, the king betrays the selfishness of that fond 
preference for his younger daughter, — tender, and paternal, 
and deep as it was, — and the depth of those hopes he was 
resting on her kind care and nursery, by the very height of 
that frenzied paroxysm of rage and disappointment, which her 
unflattering and, as it seems to him, her unloving reply, 
creates; — when that ' small fault, which showed,' he tells 
us, ' so ugly' in her whom ' he loved most ' — which turned, in 
a moment, all the sweetness of his love for her ' to gall, and like 
an engine, wrenched his nature from its firm place' ; — these are 
the terms in which he undertakes to annul the natural tie, and 
disown her — 

Lear. So young, and so untender 1 

Cordelia. So young, my lord, and true. 

Lear. Let it be so. — Thy truth then be thy dower : 

For, by the sacred radiance of the sun ; 

The mysteries of Hecate, and the night ; 

By all the operations of the orbs, 

From whom we do exist, and cease to be, 

Here I disclaim all my paternal care, 

Propinquity and property of blood, 

And as a stranger to my heart and me 

Hold thee, from this, for ever. The barbarous Scythian, 

Or he that makes his generation messes 



THE USE OF EYES. 249 

To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom 
Be as well neighboured, pitied, and relieved, 
As thou, my sometime daughter. 

And -when 

' This even-handed justice 
Commends the ingredients of his poisoned chalice 
To his own lips ' — 

when his ' dog-hearted daughters ' have returned to his own 
bosom the cruel edge of that unnatural wrong which he 
has impiously dared to summon nature herself — violated 
nature — to witness, this is the greeting which the unnatural 
Goneril receives, on her return to her husband, when she 
complains to him of her welcome — 

Goneril. I have been worth the whistle. 

Albany. Goneril ! 

You are not worth the dust which the rude wind 
Mows in your face. — I fear your disposition : 
That nature, which contemns its origin, 
Cannot be bordered certain in itself ; 
She that herself will sliver and disbranch 
From her material sap, perforce must wither, 
And come to deadly use. 

[Prima Philosophia. Axioms which are not limited to the 
particular parts of sciences, but 'such as are more common, 
and of a higher stage.'] 

Goneril. No more ; the text is foolish. 
Albany. Tigers, not daughters, — 

[You have practised on yourself — you have destroyed in 
yourself the nobler, fairer nature which the law of human 
kind — the law of human duty and affection — would have 
given you. Not daughters, — Tigers^] 

' A father, and a gracious aged man, 
Whose reverence the head-lugged bear would lick, 
Most barbarous, most degenerate !' — 

[degenerate — that is the point — most degenerate] — 

'have you madded. 
If that the heavens do not their visible spirits 



25O LEAR S PHILOSOPHER. 

Send quickly down, to tame these vile offences 
'Twill come, 

Humanity must perforce prey on itself, 
Like monsters of the deep.' 

[the land refuses a parallel.] 

And it is the scientific distinction between man and the 
brute creation — it is the law of nature in the human kind, 
which the Poet is getting out scientifically here, in the face of 
that terrific failure and degeneration in the kind — which he 
paints so vividly, for the purpose of inquiring whether there is 
not, perhaps, after all, some more potent provisioning and 
arming of man for his place in nature, than this state of things 
would lead one to suppose — whether there are not, perhaps, 
some more efficacious ' humanities ' than those mild ones 
which appear to operate so lamely on this barbaric, degenerate 
thing. c Milk-liver'd man ! ' replies Goneril, speaking not on 
her own behalf only, for the words have a double significance ; 
and the Poet glances through them at that sufferance with 
which the state of things he has just noted was endured — 

' Milk-livered man, 

That bear'st a cheek for blows, a head for wrongs ; 
Who hast not in thy brows an eye discerning 
Thine honour from thy sufferance ; that not know'st, 
Fools do those villains pity, who are punished 
Before they have done their mischief. Where's thy drum ? 
France spreads his banners in our noiseless land ; 
With plumed helm thy slayer begins threats ; 
Whilst thou, a Moral Fool, sit'st still, and crtfst, 
Alack ! why does he so V 

This is found to be an appeal of the Poet's own when all is 
done, and one that goes far into the necessary questions of the 
play. 

But Albany, in his rejoinder, returns to the idea of the lost, 
degenerate, dissolute Humanity again. He has talked of tigers, 
and head-lugged bears (and it was necessary to combine the 
proverbial sensitiveness of that animal to that particular mode 
of treatment, with the natural amiability of his disposition in 
general, in order to do justice to the Poet's conception here) ; 



THE USE OP EYES. 25 1 

— he has called upon { the monsters of the deep,' and quoted 
the laws of their societies, in illustration of the state of things 
to which the unscientific human combination appears to him 
to be visibly tending. But this human degeneracy and de- 
formity, which the action of the play exhibits in diagrams — 
the descent to the lower nature from the higher; the voluntary 
descent; the voluntary blindness and narrowness; the rejection 
of the distinctive human law — of Virtue and Duty, as reason 
and conscience interpret it — appears to the scientific mind to 
require yet other terms and comparisons. These conceits and 
comparisons, drawn from the habits of innocent, though not to 
man agreeable, animals, who have no law but blind instinct, 
do not suffice to convey the Poet's idea of this human dire- 
liction; and, accordingly, he instructs this gentle and noble 
man, whom this criticism best becomes, to complete this view 
of the subject, in his attempt to express the disgust with 
which this inhuman, this more than brutal conduct, in his 
high-born, and gorgeously-robed, and delicately -featured 
spouse, inspires him — 

'See thyself, devil!'— 

nay, he corrects himself — 

Proper deformity [de-fokhity] seems not in the fiend 

So horrid, as in woman. 
Goneril. vain fool ! 
Albany. Thou changed and self-covered thing, for shame, 

Be-monster not thy feature. Were it my fitness' — 

for here it is the human, and not the instinctive element — not 
' the blood' element that rules — 

' Were it my fitness 
To let these hands obey my blood, 
They are apt enough to dislocate and tear 
Thy flesh and bones.' 

Rather tiger-like impulses for so mild a gentleman to own 
to; but the process which he confesses his hands are already 
inclined to undertake, is not half so cruel as the one which 
this woman has practised on herself while she was meditating 



252 lear's philosopher, 

only wrong to another, and pursuing her ' horrible pleasure' 
at the expense of madness and death to another; not half so 
cruel and injurious, for in that act she has trampled down, and 
torn, and dislocated, she has slaughtered in cold blood, the 
divine, angelic form of womanhood — that form of worth and 
celestial aspiration which great nature stamped upon her, and 
gave to her for her law in nature, her type, her essence, her 
ORIGINAL. She has desecrated, not that common form of 
humanity only which the common human sentiment of reason, 
which the human sentiment of duty is everywhere struggling 
to fulfil, but that lovelier soul of humanity — that softer, subtler, 
more gracious, more celestial, more commanding spirit of it, 
which the form of womanhood in its integrity must carry with 
it — which the form of womanhood will carry with it, if it be 
not counterfeit or degenerate, gone down into a lower range, 
' be-monstered ; — l a changed and self-covered thing.' That is 
the Poet's reading. 

' Howe'er,' the Duke of Albany concludes, after that strug- 
gle with his hands he speaks of — chivalrously refusing to let 
them obey that impulse of ' blood,' as a gentleman in such 
circumstances, under any amount of provocation, should — 
true to himself, true to his manliness and to his gentle breeding, 
though his wife is false to hers, and ' false to her nature' — 

' Howe'er thou art & fiend, 
A womarfs shape doth shield thee. 
Goneril. Marry ! your manhood now.' 

This is indeed a discourse in which the reader must have 
' the text,' or ever he can begin to catch the meaning of those 
philosophic points with which this orator, who talks so ' pressly/ 
studs his lines. 

For the passage which Goneril dismisses with such scorn is 
indeed the text, or it will be, when the word which her com- 
mentary on it contains has been added to it: for it is 'the 
foolishness' of struggling with great Nature, and her LAW of 
KINDS — it is the folly of ignorance, the stupidity of living 
without respect to nature and its sequent effects, as well as its 
preformed decree — 



THE USE OP EYES. 253 

(' Perforce must wither, 
And come to deadly use ' — ) 

which this discourse is intended to illustrate. And one who 
has once tracked the dramatic development of this text, 
through all this moving exhibition of human society, and 
its violated rule in nature, will be at no loss to conjecture out 
of what ' New' book it comes, if indeed that book has ever 
been opened to him. 

The whole subject is treated here scientifically — that is, 
from without. The generalizations of the higher stages of 
philosophy — the axiomsof a universal philosophy — with all the 
force of their universality, must be brought to bear upon it, 
through all its developments. The universal historical laws, 
in that modification of them which the speciality of the human 
kind creates, must be impartially set forth here. The law of 
duty, as the natural law of human society; the law of 
humanity, as the law, nay, THE FORM, of the HUMAN kind, 
stamped on it with the Creator's stamp, that order from the 
universal law of kinds that gives to all life its special bounds, 
its ' border in itself ' — that form so essential, that there is no 
humanity or kind-ness where that is not — that law which we 
hear so much of, in its narrower aspects, under various names, 
in all men's speech, is produced here, in its broader relations, 
as the necessary basis of a scientific social art. And it is this 
author's deliberate opinion as a Naturalist, it is the opinion of 
this School in Natural Science, from which this work pro- 
ceeds, that those who undertake to compose human societies, 
large or small, whether in families, or states, or empires, with- 
out recognising this principle — those who undertake to com- 
pose UNIONS, human unions and societies, on any other 
principle — will have a diabolical jangle of it when all is done. 
For this law of unity, which is written on the soul of man, 
this law of CONSCIENCE within, is written without also ; and 
to erase it within is to get the lesson from without in that 
universal and downright speech and language which the 
axioms of nature are taught in — it is to get it in that fearful 
school in which nature repeats the doctrine of her violated 



254 lear's philosopher. 

law, for those who are not able to solve and comprehend the 
science of it as it is written — written beforehand — in the 
natural law and constitutions of the human soul. 

' That nature which contemns its origin 
Cannot be bordered certain in itself? 

[These are the mysteries of day and night, that Lear, in 
his ignorance, vainly invokes, the operations of the orbs from 
ivhom we do exist and cease to be.~] 

' She that herself will sliver and disbranch 
From her material sap, perforce must wither, 
And come to deadly use.' 

< The text is — foolish.' 

The teacher who takes it upon himself to get out this text 
from the text-book of Universal Laws, for the purpose of 
conducting it to its practical application in human affairs, 
for the purpose of suggesting the true remedy for those great 
human wants which he exhibits here, is not one of those 
1 Milk-livered men/ those Moral Fools, that Goneril delicately 
alludes to, who bear a cheek for blows, a head for wrongs; 
who have not in their brows an eye discerning their honour 
from their sufferance; who think it enough to sit still under 
the murderous blows of what they call misfortune, fate, Pro- 
vidence, when it is their own im-providence ; who think it is 
enough to sit still, and cry, Alack ! without inquiring what it 
is that makes that lack ; without ever putting the question in 
earnest, c Why does he so V His Play is all full of the practical 
application of the text, the application of it which Gloster 
sums up in a word — 

1 'Tis the Time's plague when Madmen lead the Blind.'* 

The Avhole Play is one magnificent intimation, on the part 
of the Poet, that eyes are made to see with ; and that there is 



* 



' I will preach to thee. Mark me : [says Lear] 
When we are born, we cry that we are come 
To this great stage of Fools. [Mark me !'] 



THE USE OF EYES. 255 



no so natural and legitimate use of them as that which 
human affairs were crying for, through all their lengths and 
breadths, in his time. It is that eye which is one of the 
distinctive features of the human kind; that eye which 
looks before and after, which extends human vision so far 
beyond individual sensuous experience, which is able to 
converge the light of universal truth upon particular ex- 
perience, which is able to bring the infallible guidance of 
universal axioms into all the particulars of human conduct 
— that is the eye which he finds wanting in human affairs. 
The play is pointing everywhere with the Poet's scorn of 
1 Blind Men] ' who will not see because they do not feel/ — 
who wait for the 'blows of ' fortune/ to teach them the lesson 
of Nature's laws — who wait to be scourged, or dashed to 
pieces with ' the sequent effect/ instead of making use of their 
faculty of reason to ascend to causes, and so ' to trammel up 
the consequence/ 

It is that same combination of human faculties, that 
same combination of sense and reason, which the Novum 
Organum provides for; it is that same scorn of abstract wordy 
speculation, on the one hand, and blind experimental groping, 
on the other, that is everywhere suggested here. But with the 
aid of the persons of the Drama, and their suggestions, the 
new philosophy is carried into departments which it would 
have cost the Author of the Novum Organum and the 
Advancement of Learning his head to look into. He might 
as well have proposed to impeach the Government in Parlia- 
ment outright, as to offer to advance his Novum Organum 
into these fields; fields which it enters safely enough under 
the cover of a spontaneous, inspired, dramatic philosophy, 
though it is a philosophy which overflows continually with 
those practical axioms, those aphorisms, which the Author of 
the Advancement of Learning assures us ' are made of the 
pith and heart of sciences' ; and that ' no man can write who is 
not sound and grounded/ But then, if they are only written 
in ' with a goose-pen/ they pass well enough for unconscious, 
unmeaning, spontaneous felicities. 



256 leak's philosopher. 

' Canst thou tell why one's nose stands in the middle of his 
face?' says the Fool, in the First Act, by way of entertaining 
his master, when the poor king's want of foresight and ' pru- 
dence' begins to tell on his affairs a little. ' Canst thou tell 
why one's nose stands in the middle of his face?' f No.' 
1 Why, to keep his eyes on either side of it, that what a man 
cannot smell out he may spy into. 1 

Fool. Canst tell how an oyster makes his shell V 

Lear. No. 

Fool. Nor I neither ; but I can tell why a snail has a house. 

Lear. Why? 

Fool. Why, to put his head in ; not to give it away to his daughters, 
and leave his horns without a case. t 

Lear Be nay horses ready ? 

Fool. Thy asses are gone about 'em. The reason why the seven stars 
are no more than seven, is a pretty reason. 

Lear. Because they are not eight 1 

Fool. Yes, indeed : Thou wouldest make a good — fool. 

He cannot tell how an oyster makes his shell, but the nose 
has not stood in the middle of his face for nothing. There has 
been some prying on either side of it, apparently; and he has 
pried to such good purpose, that some of the prime secrets of 
the new philosophy appear to have turned up in his researches. 
' To take it again perforce J mutters the king. l If thou wert 
my fool, Nuncle, I'd have thee beaten for being OLD before thy 
time.' [This is a wit ' of the self-same colour' with that one 
who discovered that the times from which the world's practical 
wisdom was inherited, were the times when the world was 
young. c They told me I had white hairs in my beard ere the 
black ones were there !'] ' I'd have thee beaten for being old 
before thy time.' — 'How's that?' — 'Thou shouldst not have 
been OLD before thou hadst been WISE.' 

And it is in the Second Act that poor Kent, in his misfortunes, 
furnishes occasion for another avowal on the part of this same 
learned critic, of a preference for a practical philosophy, though 
borrowed from the lower species. He comes upon the object 
of his criticism as he sits in the stocks, because he could not 
adopt the style of his time with sufficient earnestness, though 



THE USE OF EYES. 257 

he does make an attempt ' to go out of his dialect,' but was not 
more happy in it than some other men of his politics were, in 
the Poet's time. 

' Sir, in good sooth, in sincere verity, 
Under the allowance of your grand aspect, 
Whose influence, like the wreath of radiant fire 
On flickering Phebus' front — 

Cornwall. ' What niean'st by this V 

Kent ' To go out of my dialect, which you discommend so much. 

[Halting in his blank verse for the explanation] : — It is from 
that seat, to which the plainness of this man, with the official 
dignities of his time, has conducted him, that he puts the 
inquiry to that keen observer, whose observations in natural 
history have just been quoted, — 

Kent. How chances that the king comes with so small a trainl 

Fool. An thou had'st been set in the stocks for that question, thou 
hacVst well deserved it. 

Kent. Why, fool? 

Fool. We'll set thee to school to an ant, to teach thee there is no 
labouring in the winter. All that follow their noses are led by their eyes, 

but— BLIND MEN. 

Kent. Where learned'st thou that, fool ? 
Fool. Not in the stocks, fool. 

[Not from being punished with the sequent effect; not in 
consequence of an improvidence, that an ant might have taught 
me to avoid.] 

' I have no way, and therefore want no eyes ; says another 

duke, who is also the victim of that e absolute 1 authority which 

is abroad in this play. ' I stumbled when I saw,' and this is 

his prayer. 

Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man 
That slaves your ordinance ; that will not see 
Because he doth not feei,, feel your power quickly. 

' Thou seest how this world goes,' says the outcast king, 
meeting this poor outcast duke, just after his eyes had been 
taken out of his head, by the persons then occupying the 
chief offices in the state. ' Thou seest how this world goes.' 
' I see it feelingly/ is the duke's reply. 

s 



258 lear's philosopher. 

Lear. What ! art mad? A man may see how this world goes with no 
eyes. Look with thine ears. 

And his account of how it goes, is — as we shall see — 
one that requires to be looked at with ears, for it contains, 
what one calls elsewhere in this play, — ear-kissing arguments. 
— ' Get thee glass eyes,' he says, in conclusion, ' and like a 
scurvy politician,' pretend to SEE, the things thou dost not/ 
And that was not the kind of politician, and that was not the 
kind of political eye-sight, to which this statesman, and seer, 
proposed to leave the times, that his legacy should fall on, 
whatever he might be compelled to tolerate in his own. 

1 Upon the crown o' the cliff. What thing was that 

Which parted from you V 

1 A poor unfortunate beggar.'' [Softly.] 
' As 1 stood here below, methought his eyes 

Were two full moons ; he had a thousand noses. 

Horns welked and waved, like the enridged sea' 

'Now, Sir, what are you?' says the poor outcast duke to 
his true son, when in disguise he offers to attend him. ' A 
most poor man,' is the reply, ' made lame by fortune's blows; 
who, by the art of known and feeling sorrows, am 
pregnant to good pity. Give me your hand, I'll lead you to 
some biding. Bear free and patient thoughts,' is his whisper 
to him. 

Surely this is a poet that has got an inkling, in some way, 
of the new idea of an experimental philosophy , — of a combina- 
tion of the human faculties of sense and reason in some 
organum ; one, too, whose eye passes lightly over the architec- 
tonic gifts of univalves and bivalves, and entomological develop- 
ments of skill and forethought, intent on that great chrysalis, 
which has never been able to publish yet its Creator's glory. 
Here is a naturalist who would not think it enough to combine 
reason with experiment, in wind, and rain, and fire, and thunder, 
who would not think it enough to bring all the unpublished 
virtues of the earth, to the relief of the bodily human maladies. 
It is the Poet, who says elsewhere, ' Can'st thou not minister to 



THE USE OF EYES. 259 

a mind diseased? No? Throw physic to the dogs, I'll none of 
it.' It is the poet who says, ' Nor wind, rain, fire, thunder, are 
my daughters.' ' Nothing could have brought him to such a 
lowness in nature, but his un-kind daughters.' It is the natural- 
ist who says, ; Then let Kegan's heart be anatomized, and see 
what it is that breeds about it. Is there any cause in nature 
that makes these hard hearts?' 

In short, this play is from the hand of one who thinks that 
the human affairs are of a kind to require scientific investiga- 
tion, scientific foresight and conduct. He is much of Lear's 
opinion on many points, and evidently judges that there would 
be no harm in getting a philosopher enrolled among the king's 
hundred. Not a logician, not a metaphysician, according to 
the common acceptance of these terms; not merely a natural 
philosopher, in the low and limited sense of that term, in 
which we use it; but a man of science — one who is able, by 
some method or other, to ascend to the actual principles of things, 
and so to base his remedies for the social evils, on the forms which 
areform,s, which have efficacy in nature as such, instead of basing 
them on certain chimeras, or so-called logical conclusions of the 
human mind — conclusions which the logic of nature contradicts — 
conclusions to which the universal consent of things is wanting. 

Nature, in the sense in which Edmund uses that term, is not 
this poet's goddess, or his LAW ; though he regards ' the plague 
of CUSTOM ' and ' the curiosity of nations,' and all their fan- 
tastic and arbitrary sway in human affairs, with an eye 
quite as critical — though he looks at c that old Antic, the law,' 
as he expresses it elsewhere, with an eye quite as severe, on 
the world's behalf, as that which Edmund turns on it, on his 
own; he is very far from contending for the freedom of that 
savage, selfish, unreclaimed, spontaneous nature, — that lawless 
nature, to which the natural son of Gloster claims 'his ser- 
vices are due.' The poet teaches that the true and successful 
Social Art is, and must be scientific. That it must be based 
on the science of nature in general, and on the science of 
human nature in particular, on a science that recognizes the 
double nature in man, that takes in, its heights as well as its 

s 2 



260 lear's philosopher. 

depths, and its depths as well as its heights, that sounds it 
1 from its lowest note to the top of its key •' but it is one thing 
to quarrel with the unscientific, imperfect social arts, and it is 
another to prefer nature in man without arts. The picture of 
' the Unaccommodated Man,' which forms so prominent a part of 
the representation here, — 'the thing itself,' stripped of its 
social lendings, or setting at nought the social restraints, is 
not by any means an attractive one, as this philosopher does it 
for us. The scientific artist is no better pleased, than the king 
is with this kind of ' nature? It is the imperfection of the 
civilization which still generates, or leaves unchecked these 
savage evils, that he exposes. 

But it is impossible, that the true social arts should be smelt 
out, or stumbled on, by accident, or arrived at by any kind of 
empirical groping; just as impossible as it is, on the other 
hand, that ' the wisdom of nature,' by throwing itself on its 
own internal resources, and reasoning it ' thus and thus' with- 
out taking into account the actual forces, should be able to 
invent them. Those forces which enter into all the plot of 
our human life, unworthy of philosophic note as they had 
seemed hitherto, those terrific, unmeasured strengths, against 
which the human kind are continually dashing themselves in 
their blind experiments, — those engines on which the human 
heart is racked, 'and stretched out so long,' — those rocky 
structures on which its choicest treasures are so wildly wrecked, 
these natural forces, — no matter what artificial combinations of 
them may have been accomplished, — ' the causes in nature? 
of the phenomena of human life, appeared to this philoso- 
pher a very fitting subject for philosophy, and one quite too 
important in its relation to human well-being and the 
Arts that promote it, to be left to mere blundering experi- 
ment; quite too subtle to be reached by any kind of empirical 
groping, quite too subtle to be entangled with the conclusions 
of the philosophy which he found in vogue in his time, whose 
social efficacies and gifts in exorcisms, he has taken leave to 
connect in some way, with the appearance of Tom o' Bedlam 
in his history; a philosophy which had built up its system in 



THE USE OF EYES. 26 1 

defiant scorn of the nature of things; as if c by reasoning it 
thus and thus,' without any respect to the actual conditions, it 
could undertake to bridle the might of nature, and put a hook 
in the nose of her oppositions. 

It did not seem to this philosopher well, that men who have 
eyes — eyes that are great nature's gift to them, — her gift to 
them in chief, — eyes that were meant to see with, should go on 
in this groping, star-gazing, fatally-stumbling fashion any 
longer. 

Lear. [To the Bedlamite.] I do not like the fashion of your 
garments. You will say that they are — Persian : — but let them be 

ALTERED. 



262 lear's philosopher. 



CHAPTER V. 

THE STATESMAN'S NOTE-BOOK — AND THE PLAY. 

Brutus. How I have thought of this, and of these times, 
I shall recount hereafter. 

Hamlet. The Play 's the thing. 

Brutus. Tell us the manner of it, gentle Casca. 
Casca. I can as well be hanged as tell the manner 
of it. 

Posthumus. ' Shall's have a Play of this. — 

rpHE fact that the design of this play, whatever it may be, is 
-*- one deep enough to go down to that place in the social sys- 
tem which Tom o' Bedlam was then peacefully occupying, — think- 
ing of anything else in the world but a social revolution on his 
behalf — to bring him up for observation; and that it is high 
enough to go up to that apex of the social structure on which 
the crown was then fastened, to fetch down the impersonated 
state itself, for an examination not less curious and critical; 
the fact, too, that it was subtle enough to penetrate the retire- 
ment of the domestic life, and bring out its innermost passages 
for scientific criticism ; — the fact that the relation of the Parent 
to the Child, and that of the Child to the Parent, the relation 
of Husband and Wife, and Sister and Brother, and Master and 
Servant, of Peasant and Lord, nay, the transient relation of 
Guest and Host, have each their place and part here, and the 
question of their duty marked not less clearly, than that pro- 
minent relation of the King and his Subjects; — the fact that 
these relations come in from the first, along with the political, 
and demand a hearing, and divide throughout the stage with 
them ; the fact of the mere range of this social criticism, as it 
appears on the surface of the play, in. these so prominent 
points, — is enough to show already, that it is a Radical of no 
ordinary kind, who is at work behind this drop-scene. 



/- 



THE STATESMAN'S NOTE-BOOK. 263 

It was evident, at a glance, that this so extensive bill of 
grievances was not one which any immediate or violent poli- 
tical revolution, or any social reformation which was then in 
contemplation, would be able to meet; and that very circum- 
stance gave to the whole essay its profoundly quiet, conserva- 
tive air. It passed only for one of those common outcries on 
the ills of human life, which men in general are expected, or 
permitted to make, according to their several abilities; one of 
those ' Alacks!' — ' why does he so'? which, by relieving the 
mind of the complainant, tend to keep things quiet on the 
whole. This Poet, whoever he was, was making rather more 
ado about it than usual, apparently: but Poets are useful for 
that very purpose; they express other men's emotions for 
them, in a higher key than they could manage it themselves. 

It was the breadth then, — the philosophic comprehension 
of this great philosophic design, which made it possible for 
the Poet to introduce into it, and exhibit in it, so glaringly, 
those evils of his time that were crying out to Heaven then, 
for redress, and could not wait for philosophic revolutions and 
reformations. 

Tom o' Bedlam, strictly speaking, does appear, indeed, to 
have been one of those Elizabethan institutions which were 
modified or annulled, in the course of the political changes 
that so soon followed this exhibition of his case. ' Tom ' 
himself, in his own proper person, appears to have been left — 
by accident or otherwise — on the other side of the Revolution- 
ary gulf. ' I remember,' says Aubrey, c before the civil wars, 
Tom o' Bedlams went about begging/ etc. — but one cannot 
help remarking that a very numerous family connection of the 
collateral branches of his house — bearing, on the whole, a 
sufficiently striking family resemblance to this illustrious sub- 
ject of the Poet's pencil, — appear to have got safely over all 
the political and social gulfs that intervene between our time 
and that. And, as to some of those other social evils which 
are exhibited here in their ideal proportions, they are not, 
perhaps, so entirely among the former things which have 
passed away with our reformations, that we should have to go 



264 leak's philosopher. 

to Aubrey's note book to find out what the Poet means. As 
to some of these, at least, it will not be necessary to hunt up 
an antiquary, who can remember whether any such thing ever 
was really in existence here, ' before the civil vjars.' And, not- 
withstanding all our advancements in Natural Science, and in 
the Arts which attend these advancements; notwithstanding 
the strong recommendations of the inventors of this Science, — 
Regan's heart, and that which breeds about it, appear, by a 
singular oversight, to have escaped, hitherto, any truly scien- 
tific inquiry; and the arts for improving it do not appear, 
after all, to have been very materially advanced since the 
time when this order was issued. 

But notwithstanding that the subject of this piece appears 
to be so general, — notwithstanding the fact, that the social 
evils which are here represented include, apparently, the 
universal human conditions, and include evils which are still 
understood to he inherent in the nature of man, and, irre- 
claimable, or not, at least- a subject for Art, — and notwith- 
standing the fact that this exhibition professes to borrow all 
its local hues and exaggerations from the barbaric times of 
the Ancient Britons — it is not very difficult to perceive that 
it does, in fact, involve a local exhibition of a different kind; 
and that, under the cover of that great revolution in the 
human estate, which the philosophic mind was then meditating, 
— so broad, that none could perceive its project, — another 
revolution, — that revolution which was then so near at hand, 
was clearly outlined; and that this revolution, too, is, after 
all, one towards which this Poet appears to ' incline,' in a 
manner which would not have seemed, perhaps, altogether 
consistent with his position and assumptions elsewhere, if these 
could have been produced here against him; and in a manner, 
perhaps, somewhat more decided than the general philosophic 
tone, and the spirit of those large and peaceful designs to 
which he was chiefly devoted, might have led us to anticipate. 
This Play was evidently written at a time when the convic- 
tion that the state of things which it represents could not 
endure much longer, had taken deep hold of the Poet's mind ; 



THE STATESMAN'S NOTE-BOOK. 265 

at a time when those evils had attained a height so unendura- 
ble, — when that evil which lay at the heart of the commonweal, 
poisoning all the social relations with its infection, had grown 
so fearful, that it might well seem, even to the scientific mind, 
to require the fierce ' drug' of the political revolution, — so 
fearful as to make, even to such a mind, the rude surgery of 
the civil wars at last welcome. 

For, indeed, it cannot be denied that the state of things 
which this Play represents, is that with which the author's 
own experience was conversant; and that all the terrible tragic 
satire of it, points — not to that age in the history of Britain 
in which the Druids were still responsible for the national 
culture, — not to that time when the Celtic Triads, clothed 
with the sanctities of an unknown past, still made the standard 
works and authorities in learning, beyond which there was no 
going, — not to the time when the national morality was still 
mystically produced at Stonehenge, in those national colleges, 
from whose mysterious rites the awful sanctities of the oak 
and the mistletoe drove back in confusion the sacrilegious 
inquirer, — not to that time, but to the Elizabethan. 

That instinctive groping and stumbling in all human 
affairs, that pursuit of human ends without any science of 
the natures to be superinduced, and without any science of 
the natures that were to be subjected, — those eyes of moon- 
shine speculation, those glass eyes with which the scurvy 
politician affects to see the things he does not — those thou- 
sand noses that serve for eyes, and horns welked and waved 
like the enridged sea, and all the wild misery of that unlearned 
fortuitous human living, that waits to be scourged with the 
sequent effect, and knows not how to ascend to the cause — 
colossally exaggerated as it seems here — heightened every- 
where, as if the Poet had put forth his whole power, and 
strained his imagination, and availed himself of his utmost 
poetic license, to give it, through all its details, its last con- 
ceivable hue of violence, its pure ideal shape, is, after all, but 
a copy, an historical sketch. The ignorance, the stupidity, 
' the blindness,' that this author paints, was his own ' Time's 



266 leak's philosopher. 

plague' ; ' the madness' that ' led it,' was the madness of which 
he was himself a mute and manacled spectator. 

By some singular oversight or caprice of tyranny, or on 
account of some fastidious scruple of the imagination perhaps, 
it does not appear, indeed, to have been the fashion, either in 
the reigns of the Tudors or the Stuarts, to pluck out the living 
human eye as Gloster's eyes were plucked out; and that of 
itself would have furnished a reason why this poor duke 
should have been compelled to submit to that particular opera- 
tion, instead of presenting himself to have his ears cut off in a 
sober, decent, civilized, Christian manner; or to have them 
grubbed out, if it happened that the operation had been once 
performed already; or to have his hand cut off, or his head, 
with his eyes in it ; or to be roasted alive some noon-day in the 
public square, eyes and all, as many an honest gentleman Avas 
expected to present himself in those times, without making any 
particular demur or fuss about it. These were operations that 
Englishmen of every rank and profession, soldiers, scholars, 
poets, philosophers, lawyers, physicians, and grave and reverend 
divines, were called on to undergo in those times, and for that 
identical offence of which the Duke of Gloster stood convict- 
ed, opposition to the will of a lawless usurping tyranny, — 
to its merest caprice of vanity or humour, perhaps, — or on 
grounds slighter still, on bare suspicion of a disposition to 
oppose it. 

But then that, of course, was a thing of custom; so much 
so, that the victims themselves often took it in good part, and 
submitted to it as a divine institution, part of a sacred legacy, 
handed down to them, as it was understood, from their more 
enlightened ancestors. 

Now, if the Poet, in pursuance of his more general philo- 
sophic intention, which involved a moving representation of 
the helplessness of the Social Monad — that bodily as well as 
moral susceptibility and fragility, which leaves him open to all 
kinds of personal injury, not from the elements and from 
animals of other species merely or chiefly, but chiefly from his 
own kind, — if the Poet, in the course of this exhibition, had 



THE STATESMAN'S NOTE-BOOK. 267 

caused poor Gloster to be held down in his chair on the stage, 
for the purpose of having his ears pared off, what kind of sen- 
sation could he hope to produce with that on the sensibility of 
an audience, who might have understood without a commen- 
tator an allusion to 'the tribulation of Tower Hill' — spectators 
accustomed to witness performances so much more thrilling, 
and on a stage where the Play was in earnest. And as to 
that second operation before referred to, which might have 
answered the poetic purpose, perhaps; who knows whether 
that may not have been a refinement in civilization peculiar 
to the reign of that amiable and handsome Christian Prince, 
who was still a minor when this Play was first brought out at 
Whitehall ? for it was in his reign that that memorable in- 
stance of it occurred, which the subsequent events connected 
with it chanced to make so notorious. It was a learned and 
very conscientious lawyer, in the reign of Charles the First, 
whose criticism upon some of the fashionable amusements of 
the day, which certain members of the royal family were 
known to be fond of, occasioned the suggestion of this mode 
of satisfying the outraged Majesty of the State, when the 
prying eye of Government discovered, or thought it did, 
remains enough of those previously-condemned appendages on 
this author's person, to furnish material for a second operation. 
' Methinks Mr. Prynne hath ears !' does not, after all, sound so 
very different from — ' going to pluck out Gloster's other eye,' 
as that the governments under which these two speeches are 
reported, need to be distinguished, on that account only, by 
any such essential difference as that which is supposed to exist 
between the human and divine. Both these operations appear, 
indeed to the unprejudiced human mind, to savour somewhat 
of the diabolical — or of the Dark Ages, rather, and of the 
Prince of Darkness. And, indeed, that 'fiend' which haunts 
the Play — which the monster, with his moonshine eyes, ap- 
peared to have a vague idea of — seems to have been as busy 
here, in this department, as he was in bringing about poor 
Tom's distresses. 

But in that steady persevering exhibition of the liabilities 



268 lear's philosopher. 

of individual human nature, the COMMON liabilities which 
throw it upon the COMMON, the distinctive law of humanity, 
for its WEAL — in that continuous picture of the suffering, 
and ignominy, and mutilation to which it is liable, moral and 
intellectual, as well as physical, where that law of humanity is 
not yet scientifically developed and scientifically sustained — 
the Poet does not always go quite so far to find his details. 
It is not from the Celtic Kegan's time that he brings out those 
ancient implements of state authority into which the feet of 
the poor Duke of Kent, travelling on the king's errands, are 
ignominiously thrust; while the Poet, under cover of the 
Fool's jests, shows prettily their relation to the human 
dignity. 

But then it is a Duke on whom this indignity is practised ; 
for it is to be remarked, in passing, that though this Poet is 
evidently bent on making his exhibition a thorough one, 
though he is determined not to leave out anything of im- 
portance in his diagrams, he does not appear inclined to soil 
his fingers by meddling with the lower orders, or to counte- 
nance any innovation in his art in that respect. Whenever 
he has occasion to introduce persons of this class into his 
pieces, they come in and go out, and perform their part in his 
scene, very much as they do elsewhere in his time. Even 
when his Players come in, they do not speak many words on 
their own behalf. They stand civilly, and answer questions, 
and take their orders, and fulfil them. That is all that is 
looked for at their hands. For this is not a Poet who has 
ever given any one occasion in his own time, to distinguish 
him as the Poet of the People. It is always from the 
highest social point of observation that he takes those 
views of the lower ranks, which he has occasion to introduce 
into his Plays, from the mobs of ' greasy citizens' to the de- 
tails of the sheep-shearing feast; and even in Eastcheap 
he keeps it still. 

There never was a more aristocratic poet apparently, and 
though the very basest form of outcast misery ' that ever 
penury in contempt of man brought near to beast,' though the 



THE STATESMAN'S NOTE-BOOK. 269 

basest and most ignoble and pitiful human liabilities, are every 
where included in his plan; he will have nothing but the rich 
blood of dukes and kings to take him through with it — he 
will have nothing lower and less illustrious than these to play 
his parts for him. 

It is a king to whom ' the Farm House, 1 where both fire and 
food are waiting, becomes a royal luxury on his return from 
the Hovel's door, brought in chattering out of the tempest, in 
that pitiful stage of human want, which had made him ready 
to share with Tom o' Bedlam, nay, with the swine, their rude 
comforts. 'Art cold? I am cold myself. Where is this 
straw, my fellow. Your hovel: — come bring us to your 
hovel.' 

It is a king who gets an ague in the storm, who finds the 
tyranny of the night too rough for nature to endure; it is a king 
on whose desolate outcast head, destitution and social wrongs 
accumulate their results, till his wits begin to turn, till his 
mind is shattered, and he comes on to the stage at last, a poor 
bedlamite. 

Xay, ' Tom' himself, is a duke's son, ws are told; though 
that circumstance does not hinder him from giving, with much 
frankness and scientific accuracy, the particulars of those per- 
sonal pursuits, and tastes, and habits, incidental to that par- 
ticular station in life to which it has pleased Providence to call 
him. 

And so by means of that poetic order, which is the Provi- 
dence of this piece, and that design which ' tunes the harmony 
of it,' it is a duke on whom that low correction, 'such as 
basest and most contemned wretches are punished with,' is 
exhibited, in spite of his indignant protest. 

Kent. Call not your stocks for me. / serve the king, 

On whose employment I was sent to you. 

You shall do small respect, show too bold malice 

Against the grace and person of my master, 

Stocking his messenger. 
Cornwall. Fetch forth the stocks. 

As I have life and honour, there shall he sit till noon.' 
Regan. Till noon, — till night my lord, and all night too. 



27O LEAKS PHILOSOPHER. 

[In vain the prudent and loyal Gloster remonstrates] 

— The king must take it ill 
That he, so slightly valued in his messenger, 
Should have him thus restrained. 

Cornwall. I'll answer that. 

Regan. Put in his legs. 

But then it must be confessed that the poet was not without 
some kind of precedent for this bold dramatic proceeding. 
He had, indeed, by means of the culture and diligent use of 
that gift of forethought, with which nature had so largely en- 
dowed him, been enabled thus far to keep his own person free 
from any such tangible encumbrance, though the 'lameness'' with 
which fortune had afflicted him personally, is always his personal 
grievance; but he had seen in his own time, ancient men and 
reverend, — men who claimed to be the ministers of heaven, 
and travelling on its errands, arrested, and subjected to this 
ludicrous indignity : he had seen this open stop, this palpable, 
corporeal, unrig urative arrest put upon the activity of scholars 
and thinkers in his time, conscientious men, between whose 
master and the state, there was a growing quarrel then, a 
quarrel that these proceedings were not likely to pacify. From 
noon till night, they, too, had sat thus, and all night too, they 
had endured that shameful lodging. 

' When a man is over lusty at legs,' says the Fool, who 
arrives in time to put in an observation or two on this topic, 
and who seems disposed to look at it from a critical point of 
view, concluding with the practical improvement of the subject, 
already quoted — ' When a man is over lusty at legs ' — (when 
his will, or his higher intelligence, perhaps, is allowed to 
govern them too freely,) 'he wears wooden nether stocks,' or 
' cruel garters,' as he calls them again, by way of bestowing on 
this institution of his ancestors as much variety of poetic 
imagery as the subject will admit of. ' Horses are tied by the 
head, dogs and bears by the neck, monkeys by the loins, and 
men by the legs ' ; and having ransacked his memory to such 
good purpose, and produced such a pile of learned precedents, 
he appears disposed to rest the case with these ; for it is a part 



THE STATESMAN'S NOTE-BOOK. 27 1 

of the play to get man into his place in the scale of nature, 
and to draw the line between him and the brutes, if there be 
any such thing possible ; and the Fool seems to be particularly 
inclined to assist the author in this process, though when'' we 
last heard of him he was, indeed, proposing to send the prin- 
cipal man of his time ' to school to an ant,' to improve his 
sagacity; intimating, also, that another department of natural 
science, even conchology itself, might furnish him with some 
rather more prudent and fortunate suggestions than those 
which his own brain had appeared to generate ; and it is to be 
remarked, that in his views on this point, as on some others of 
importance, he has the happiness to agree remarkably with 
that illustrious yoke-fellow of his in philosophy, who was just 
then turning his attention to the ' practic part of life' and its 
' theoric,' and who indulges himself in some satires on this point 
not any less severe, though his pleasantries are somewhat more 
covert. But the philosopher on this occasion, having pro- 
duced such a variety of precedents from natural history, 
appears to be satisfied with the propriety and justice of the 
proceeding, inasmuch as beasts and men seem to be treated 
with impartial consideration in it; and though a certain dis- 
tinction of form appears to obtain according to the species, the 
main fact is throughout identical. 

' Then comes the time,' he says, in winding up that knotted 
skein of prophecy, which he leaves for Merlin to disentangle, for 
' he lives before his time,' as he takes that opportunity to tell us — 
' Then comes the time, who lives to see't, 
That going shall be used with feet.' 

Yes, it is a duke who is put in the stocks; it is a duke's son 
who plays the bedlamite ; it is a king who finds the hovel's 
shelter ' precious ' ; and it is a queen — it is a king's wife, and 
a daughter of kings — who is hanged; nay more, it is Cordelia 
— it is Cordelia, and none other, whom this inexorable Poet, 
primed with mischief, bent on outrage, determined to turn out 
the heart of his time, and show, in the selectest form, the inmost 
lining of its lurking humanities — it is Cordelia whom he will 
hang. And we forgive him still, and bear with him in all 



2J2 LEARS PHILOSOPHER. 

these assaults on our taste — in all these thick-coming blows 
on our outraged sensibilities ; we forgive him when at last the 
poetic design flashes on us, — when we come to understand the 
providence of this piece, at least, — when we come to see at 
last that there is a meaning in it all, a meaning deep enough 
to justify even this procedure. 

' We are not the first who, with the best meaning, have in- 
curred the worst? says the captive queen herself; nor was she 
the last of that good company, as the Poet himself might have 
testified ; — 

Upon such sacrifices the gods themselves throw incense. 

We forgive the Poet here, as we forgive him in all these 
other pitiful and revolting exhibitions, because we know that 
he who would undertake the time's cure — he who would un- 
dertake the relief of the human estate in any age, must probe 
its evil — must reach, no matter what it costs, its deadliest 
hollow. 

And in that age, there was no voice which could afford to 
lack ' the courtier's glib and oily art.' ' Hanging was the word ' 
then, for the qualities of which this princess was the imper- 
sonation, or almost the impersonation, so predominant were 
they in her poetic constitution. There was no voice, gentle and 
low enough, to speak outright such truth as hers; and ' banish- 
ment ' and ' the stocks ' would have been only too mild a remedy 
for s the plainness ' to which Kent declares, even to the teeth 
of majesty, ' honour's bound, when majesty stoops to folly.' 

The kind, considerate Gloster, with all his loyalty to the 
powers which are able to show the divine right of possession, 
and with all his disposition to conform to the times, is greatly 
distressed and perplexed with the outrages which are perpe- 
trated, as it were, under his own immediate sanction and 
authority. He has a hard struggle to reconcile his duty as 
the subject of a state which he is not prepared to overthrow, 
with his humane impulses and designs. He goes pattering 
about for a time, remonstrating, and apologizing, and trying 
1 to smooth down,' and ' hush up,' and mollify, and keep peace 



THE STATESMAN'S NOTE-BOOK. 



2/3 



between the offending parties. He stands between the blunt, 
straightforward manliness of the honest Kent on the one hand, 
and the sycophantic servility and self-abnegation, which knows 
no will but the master's, as represented by the Steward, on 
the other. 

' I am sorry for thee,' he says to Kent, after having sought 
in vain to prevent this outrage from being perpetrated in his 
own court — 

' I am sorry for thee, friend : tis the duke's pleasure, 
Whose disposition all the world well knows, 
Will not be rubbed or stopped'' — 

as he found to his cost, poor man, when he came to have his 
own eyes gouged out by it. He ' saw it feelingly ' then, as he 
remarked himself. 

' I'll entreat for thee/ he continues, in his conversation with 
the disguised duke in the stocks. ' The duke 's to blame in 
this. 'Twill be ill taken.' 

And when the king, on his arrival, kept waiting in the 
court, in his agony of indignation and grief, is told that 
Regan and Cornwall are ' sick/ ' they are weary,' ' they have 
travelled hard to-night,' denounces these subterfuges, and bids 
Gloster fetch him a better answer, this is the worthy man's 

reply to him — 

' My dear lord, 
You know the fiery quality of the duke, 
How unremovable and fixed he is 
In his own course.' 

But Lear, who has never had any but a subjective acquaint- 
ance hitherto with reasons of that kind, does not appear able 
to understand them from this point of view — 

Lear. "Vengeance ! plague ! death ! confusion ! 

Fiery f — what quality ? Why Gloster, Gloster, 
I'd speak with the Duke of Cornwall and his wife. 

Gloster. Well, my good lord, I have informed them so. 

Lear. Informed them 1 Dost thou understand me 1 

Gloster. Ay, my good lord. 

But though Gloster is not yet ready to break with tyranny, 

T 



274 lear's philosopher. 

it is not difficult to see which way he secretly inclines; and 
though he still manages his impulses cautiously, and contrives 
to succour the oppressed king by stealth, his courage rises 
with the emergency, and grows bold with provocation. For 
he is himself one of the finer and finest proofs of the times 
which the Poet represents; one, however, which he keeps 
back a little, for the study of those who look at his work most 
carefully. This man stands here in the general, indeed, as the 
representative of a class of men who do not belong exclusively 
to this particular time — men who do not stand ready, as Kent 
and his class do, to fly in the face of tyranny at the first pro- 
vocation ; they are not the kind of men who ' make mouths,' 
as Hamlet says, 'at the invisible event;' — they are the kind 
who know beforehand that to break with the powers that are, 
single-handed, is to sit on the stage and have your eyes gouged 
out, or to undergo some process of mutilation and disfigure- 
ment, not the less painful and oppressive, by this Poet's own 
showing, because it does not happen, perhaps, to be a physical 
one, and not the less calculated, on that account, to impair 
one's usefulness to one's species, it may be. 

But besides that more general bearing of the representation, 
the part and disposition of Gloster afford us from time to time, 
glimpses of persons and things which connect the representa- 
tion more directly with the particular point here noted. Men 
who found themselves compelled to occupy a not less equivocal 
position in the state, look through it a little now and then; and 
here, as in other parts of the play, it only wants the right key 
to bring out suppressed historical passages, and a finer history 
generally, than the chronicles of the times were able to take 
up. 

' Alack, alack, Edmund,' says Gloster to his natural son, 
making him the confidant of his nobler nature, putting what 
was then the perilous secret of his humanity, into the danger- 
ous keeping of the base-born one — for this is the Poet's own 
interpretation of his plot; though Lear is allowed to intimate 
on his behalf, that the loves and relations which are recognised 
and good in courts of justice, are not always secured by that 



THE STATESMAN'S NOTE-BOOK. 275 

sanction from similar misfortune; that they are not secured 
by that from those penalties which great Nature herself awards 
in those courts in which her institutes are vindicated. 

'Alack, alack, Edmund, I like not this unnatural dealing ! 'When 
I desired their leave that 1 might pity him, they took from me the use of 
mine own house, and charged me on pain of their perpetual displeasure, 
neither to speak of him, entreat for him, nor in any way to sustain him? 

1 Edmund. Most savage and unnatural.' 
1 Gloster. Go to, say you nothing.' 

[And say you nothing, my co temporary reader, if you per- 
ceive that this is one of those passages I have spoken of else- 
where, which carries with it another application besides that 
which I put it to]. 

' There is division between the dukes — and a worse matter than that : 
I have received a letter this night, — 'tis dangerous to be spoken ; — 
I have locked the letter in my closet: these injuries the king now bears, 
will be revenged at home 1 [softly — say you nothing]. ' There is part 
of a power already footed : we must incline to the king. I will seek 
him and privily relieve him. Go you and maintain talk with the duke, 
that my charity be not of him perceived. If he ask for me, I am ill, 
and gone to bed. If I die for it, — as no less is threatened me, — the 
king, my old master — must be relieved. There is some strange thing 
toward, Edmund. Pray you be careful.' 

Even Edmund himself professes to be not altogether with- 
out some experience of the perplexity which the claims of 
apparently clashing duties, and relations in such a time creates, 
though he seems to have found an easy method of disposing of 
these questions. Nature is his goddess and his law (that is, 
as he uses the term, the baser nature, the degenerate, which is 
not nature for man, which is unnatural for the human kind), 
and in his own ' rat'-like fashion, ' he bites the holy cords 
atwain.' 

' How, my lord,' he says, in the act of betraying his father's 
secret to the Duke of Cornwall, in the hope of ' drawing to 
himself what his father loses' — ' how I may be censured that 
nature, thus gives way to loyalty, something fears me to 
think of.' And again, ' I will persevere in my course of loyalty, 
though the conflict be sore between that and my blood? 

T 2 



276 leak's philosopher. 

' Know thou this, 1 he says afterwards, to the officer whom he 
employs to hang Cordelia, ' that men are as the time is. 
Thy great employment will not bear question. About it, I 
say, instantly, and carry it so as I have set it down/ * I can- 
not draw a cart, nor eat dried oats,' is the officer's reply, who 
appears to be also in the poet's secret, and ready to aid his 
intention of carrying out the distinction between the human 
kind and the brute, ' I cannot draw a cart, nor eat dried oats; 
— if it be man's work I will do it/ 

But it is the steward's part, as deliberately explained by 
Kent himself, which furnishes in detail the ideal antagonism 
of that which Kent sustains in the piece; for beside those 
active demonstrations of his disgust, which the poetic order 
tolerates in him, though some of the powers within appear to 
take such violent offence at it, besides these tangible demon- 
strations, and that elaborate criticism, which the poet puts 
into his mouth, in which the steward is openly treated as the 
representative of a class, who seem to the poet apparently, to 
require some treatment in his time, Kent himself is made to 
notice distinctly this literally striking opposition. 

' No contraries hold more antipathy than I, and such a 
knave,' he says to Cornwall, by way of explaining his appa- 
rently gratuitous attack upon the steward. 

No one, indeed, who reads the play with any care, can 
doubt the poet's intention to incorporate into it, for some 
reason or other, and to bring out by the strongest conceivable 
contrasts, his study of loyalty and service, and especially of 
regal counsel, and his criticism of it, as it stood in his time in 
its most approved patterns. ' Such smiling rouges as these' 
(' that bite the holy cords atwain'). 

' Smooth every passion 
That in the nature of their lord rebels ; 
Bring oil to fire, snow to their colder moods ; 
Revenge, affirm, and turn their halcyon beaks 
With every gale and vary of their masters, 
As knowing nought like dogs but — following? 

Such rouges as this would not, of course, be wanting in 



THE STATESMAN S NOTE-BOOK. 



277 



such a time as that in which this piece was planned, if 
Edmund's word was, indeed, the true one. ' Know thou this, 
men are as the time is.' 

And even amidst the excitement and rough outrage of that 
scene — in which Gloster's trial is so summarily conducted, 
even in that so rude scene — the relation between the guest 
and his host, and the relation of the slave to his owner, is 
delicately and studiously touched, and the human claim in 
both is boldly advanced, in the face of an absolute authority, 
and age and personal dignity put in their claims also, and 
demand, even at such a moment, their full rights of reverence. 

[Re-enter servants with Gloster.] 
Regan. Ingrateful fox ! 'tis he. 
Cornwall. Bind fast his corky arms. 
Gloster. What mean your graces 1 Good my friends, consider 

You are my guests : do me no foul play, friends. 
Cornwall. Bind him, I say. 

Regan. Hard, hard : — filthy traitor ! 

Gloster. Unmerciful lady as you are, I am none. 
Cornwall. To this chair bind him : — Villain, thou shalt find — 

[Regan plucks his beard]. 
Gloster. By the kind gods [for these are the gods, whose ' Com- 
mission! is sitting here] 'tis most ignobly done, 

To pluck me by the beard. 
Regan. So white, and such a traitor ! 
Gloster. Naughty lady, 

These hairs, which thou dost ravish from my chin, 

"Will quicken and accuse thee. 

/ am your host : 

With robber hands, my hospitable favours 

You should not ruffle thus. * * * 



Tied to the stake, questioned and cross-questioned, and in- 
sulted, finally, beyond even his faculty of endurance, he breaks 
forth, at last, in strains of indignation that overleap all arbi- 
trary and conventional bounds, that are only the more terrible 
for having been so long suppressed. Kent himself, when he 
c came between the dragon and his wrath/ was not so fierce. 



278 lear's philosopher. 

Cornwall. Where hast thou sent the king ? 
Gloster. To Dover. 
Regan. Wherefore 

To Dover, was't thou not charged at peril ? — 
Cornwall. Wherefore to Dover ? Let him first answer that. 
Regan. Wherefore to Dover ? 
Gloster. Because I would not see thy cruel nails 

Pluck out his poor old eyes, nor thy fierce sister 

In his anointed flesh stick boarish fangs. 

* # * * 

Regan. One side will mock another ; the other too. 
Cornwall. If you ' see vengeance.' 
/Servant. Hold your hand, my lord : 

I have served you ever since 1 was a child ; 

But better service have I never done you, 

Than now to bid you hold. 
Regan. How now, you dog ? 

Servant. If you did wear a beard upon your chin, 

I'd shake it on this quarrel : What do you mean ? 
[Arbitrary power called to an account, requested to explain itself.] 
Cornwall. My villain ! 
Regan. A peasant stand up thus ? 

Thus too, indeed, in that rude scene above referred to, in 
which the king finds his messenger in the stocks, and Eegan's 
door, too, shut against him, the same ground of criticism had 
already been revealed, the same delicacy and rigour in the 
exactions had already betrayed the depth of the poetic design, 
and the real comprehension of that law, whose violations are 
depicted here, the scientific law, the scientific sovereignty, the 
law of universal nature; commanding, in the human, that 
specific human excellence, for the degenerate movement is in 
violation of nature, that is not nature but her profanation and 
undoing. 

This is one of those passages, however, which admit, as the 

modern reader will more easily observe than the contemporary 

of the Poet was likely to of a second reading. 

Goneril. Why might not you, my lord, receive attendance 
From those that she calls servants, or from mine 1 
* * * * 

What need you five-and-twenty, ten, or five, 
To follow in a house, where twice so many 
Have a command to tend you ? 



THE STATESMAN'S NOTE-BOOK. 279 

Regan. What need one ] 

Lear. O reason not the need : our basest beggars 
Are in the poorest things superfluous. 

[Poor Tom must have his ' rubans.'] 
Allow not nature more than nature needs, 
Man's life were cheap as beasts [and that 's not nature']. 
Thou art a lady, 
If only to go warm were gorgeous, 
Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear'st, 
Which scarcely keeps thee warm. — But, for true need, 
You heavens, give me that patience. — Patience I need. 

It is, indeed, the doctrine of the ' true need ' that is lurking 
here, and all that puts man into his true place and relations in 
the creative order, whether of submission or control is included 
in it. It is the doctrine of the natural human need, and the 
natural ground and limits of the arts, for which nature has 
endowed man beforehand, with a faculty and a sentiment 
corresponding in grandeur to his need, — large as he is little, 
noble as he is mean, powerful as he is helpless, felicitous as he 
is wretched; the faculty and the sentiment whereby the want 
of man becomes the measure of his wealth and grandeur, — 
whereby his conscious loivness becomes the means of his ascent 
to his ideal type in nature, and to the scientific perfection of 
his form. 

And this whole social picture, — rude, savage as it is, — 
savage as it shews when its sharp outline falls on that fair 
ideal ground of criticism which the doctrine of a scientific 
civilization creates, — is but the Poet's report of the progress 
of human development as it stood in his time, and of the 
gain that it had made on savage instinct then. It is his report 
of the social institutions of his time, as he found them on his 
map of human advancement. It is his report of the wild 
social misery that was crying underneath them, with its 
burthen of new advancements. It is the Poet's Apology for 
his new doctrine of human living, which he is going to 
publish, and leave on the earth, for ' the times that are far off.' 
It is the negative, which is the first step towards that affirma- 
tion, which he is going to establish on the earth for ever, or so 



280 lear's philosofher. 

long as the species, whose law he has found, endures on it. 
Down to its most revolting, most atrocious detail, it is still 
the Elizabethan civility that is painted here. Even Goneril's 
unscrupulous mode of disposing of her rival sister, though 
that was the kind of murder which was then regarded with the 
profoundest disgust and horror — (the queen in Cymbeline ex- 
presses that vivid sentiment, when she says : ' If Pisanio have 
given his mistress that confection which I gave him for a cor- 
dial, she is served as I would serve a rat ') — even as to that we 
all know what a king's favourite felt himself competent to un- 
dertake then; and, if the clearest intimations of such men as 
Bacon, and Coke, and Raleigh, on such a question, are of any 
worth, the household of James the First was not without a 
parallel even for that performance, if not when this play was 
written, when it was published. 

It is all one picture of social ignorance, and misery, and 
frantic misrule. It is a faithful exhibition of the degree of 
personal security which a man of honourable sentiments, and 
humane and noble intentions, could promise himself in such a 
time. It shows what chance there was of any man being 
permitted to sustain an honourable and intelligent part in the 
world, in an age in which all the radical social arts were yet 
wanting, in which the rude institutions of an ignorant past 
spontaneously built up, without any science of the natural 
laws, were vainly seeking to curb and quench the Incarnate 
soul of new ages, — the spirit of a scientific human advance- 
ment; and, when all the common welfare was still openly 
intrusted to the unchecked caprice and passion of one selfish, 
pitiful, narrow, low-minded man. 

To appreciate fully the incidental and immediate political 
application of the piece, however, it is necessary to observe 
that notwithstanding that studious exhibition of lawless and 
outrageous power, which it involves, it is, after all, we are 
given to understand, by a quiet intimation here and there, a 
limited monarchy which is put upon the stage here. It is a 
constitutional government, very much in the Elizabethan stage 
of development, as it would seem, which these arbitrary rulers 



THE STATESMAN'S NOTE-BOOK. 28 1 

affect to be administering. It is a government which professes 
to be one of law, under which the atrocities of this piece are 
sheltered. 

And one may even note, in passing, that that high Judicial 
Court, in which poor Lear undertakes to get his cause tried, 
appears to have, somehow, an extremely modern air, consider- 
ing what age of the British history it was, in which it was 
supposed to be constituted, and considering that one of the 
wigs appointed to that Bench had to leave his speech behind 
him for Merlin to make, in consequence of living before his 
time : at all events it is already tinctured with some of the more 
notorious Elizabethan vices — vices which onr Poet, not content 
with this exposition, contrived to get exposed in another 
manner, and to some purpose, ere all was done. 

Lear. It shall be done, I will arraign them straight ! 
Come, sit thou here, most learned Justice. 

[To the Bedlamite.] 
Thou, sapient Sir, sit here. [ To the Fool]. 

And again, — 

I'll see their trial first. Bring in the evidence. 
Thou robed man of justice take thy place. 

[To Tom o' Bedlam]. 
And thou, his yokefellow of equity bench by his side. 

To the Fool]. 
You are of ' the Commission ' — sit you too. 

[To Kent]. 

Truly it was a bold wit that could undertake to constitute 
that bench on the stage, and fill it with those speaking forms, 
— speaking to the eye the unmistakeable significance, for these 
judges, two of them, happened to be on the spot in full cos- 
tume, — and as to the third, he was of c the commission. 1 ' Sit 
you, too.' Truly it was a bold instructor that could under- 
take ' to facilitate' the demonstration of ' the more chosen 
subjects/ with the' aid of diagrams of this kind. 

Arms ! Arms ! Sword, fire ! Corruption in the place ! 
False justicer, why hast thou let her scape 1 

The tongues of these ancient sovereigns of Britain, ' tang ' 



282 leak's philosopher. 

throughout with Elizabethan ' arguments of state/ and even 
Goneril, in her somewhat severe proceedings against hex father, 
justifies her course in a very grave and excellent speech, en- 
riched with the choicest phrases of that particular order of 
state eloquence, in which majesty stoops graciously to a recog- 
nition of the subject nation; — a speech from which we gather 
that the ' tender of a wholesome weal ' is, on the whole, the 
thing which she has at heart most deeply, and though the 
proceeding in question is a painful one to her feelings, a state 
necessity appears to prescribe it, or at least, render it ' discreet.' 
Even in Gloster's case, though the process to which he is 
subjected, is, confessedly, an extemporaneous one, it appears 
from the Duke of Cornwall's statement, that it was only the 
form which was wanting to make it legal. Thus he apologizes 
for it. — 

Though well we may not pass upon his life 
Without the form of justice, yet our power 
Shall do a courtesy to our wrath, which men 
May blame, but not control. 

Goneril, however, grows bolder at the last, and says out- 
right, ' Say if I do, the laws are mine NOT thine.' But it is 
the law which is thine and mine, it is the law which is for Tom 
o' Bedlam and for thee, that great nature speaking at last 
through her interpreter, and explaining all this wild scene, will 
have vindicated. 

Most monstrous, exclaims her illustrious consort ;but at 
the close of the play, where so much of the meaning some- 
times comes out in a word, he himself concedes that the 
government which has just devolved upon him is an absolute 
monarchy. 

' For us,' he says, ' we will resign, during the life of this 
old Majesty, our absolute power.' 

So that there seems to have been, in fact,— ; in the minds, too, 
of persons who ought, one would say, to have been best in- 
formed on this subject, — just that vague, uncertain, contradic- 
tory view of this important question, which appears to have 
obtained in the English state, during the period in which the 



THE PLAT. 283 

material of this poetic criticism was getting slowly accumu- 
lated. But of course this play, so full of the consequences of 
arbitrary power, so full of Elizabethan politics, with its ' ear- 
kissing arguments,' could not well end, till that word, too, 
had been spoken outright ; and, in the Duke of Albany's resig- 
nation, it slips in at last so quietly, so properly, that no one 
perceives that it is not there by accident. 

This, then, is what the play contains; but those that follow 
the story and the superficial plot only, must, of course, lose 
track of the interior identities. It does not occur to these that 
the Poet is occupied with principles, and that the change of 
persons does not, in the least, confound his pursuit of them. 

The fact that tyranny is in one act, or in one scene, repre- 
sented by Lear, and in the next by his daughters; — the fact 
that the king and the father is in one act the tyrant, and in 
another, the victim of tyranny, is quite enough to confound 
the criticism to which a work of mere amusement is subjected; 
for it serves to disguise the philosophic purport, by dividing it 
on the surface: and the dangerous passages are all opposed and 
neutralised, for those who look at it only as a piece of drama- 
tized, poetic history. 

For this is a philosopher who prefers to handle his principles 
in their natural, historical combinations, in those modified 
unions of opposites, those complex wholes, which nature so 
stedfastly inclines to, instead of exhibiting them scientifically 
bottled up and labelled, in a state of fierce chemical abstrac- 
tion. 

His characters are not like the characters in the old ' Moral- 
ities,' which he found on the stage when he first besran to turn 
his attention to it, mere impersonations of certain vague, loose, 
popular notions. Those sickly, meagre forms would not 
answer his purpose. It was necessary that the actors in the 
New Moralities he was getting up so quietly, should have 
some speculation in their eyes, some blood in their veins, a 
kind of blood that had never got manufactured in the Poet's 
laboratory till then. His characters, no matter how strong the 
predominating trait, though ' the conspicuous instance ' of it be 



284 leak's philosopher. 

selected, have all the rich quality, the tempered and subtle 
power of nature's own compositions. The expectation, the 
interest, the surprise of life and history, waits, with its charm, 
on all their speech and doing. 

The whole play tells, indeed, its own story, and scarcely 
needs interpreting, when once the spectator has gained the 
true dramatic stand-point; when once he understands that 
there is a teacher here, — a new one, — one who will not under- 
take to work with the instrumentalities that his time offered to 
him, who begins by rejecting the abstractions which lie at the 
foundation of all the learning of his time, which are not 
scientific, but vague, loose, popular notions, that have 
been collected without art, or scientific rule of rejection, and 
are, therefore, inefficacious in nature, and unavailable for ' the 
art and practic part of life;' a teacher who will build up his 
philosophy anew, from the beginning, a teacher who will begin 
with history and particulars, who will abstract his definitions 
from nature, and have powers of them, and not words only, and 
make them the basis of his science and the material and instru- 
ment of his reform. ' / will teach you differences' says Kent 
to the steward, alluding on the part of his author, for he does 
not profess to be metaphysical himself to another kind of dis- 
tinction, than that which obtained in the schools; and accom- 
panying the remark, on his own part, with some practical 
demonstrations, which did not appear to be taken in good 
part at all by the person he was at such pains to instruct in 
his doctrine of distinctions. 

The reader who has once gained this clue, the clue which 
the question of design and authorship involves, will find this 
play, as he will find, indeed, all this author's plays, overflow- 
ing every where with the scientific statement, — the finest 
abstract statement of that which the action, with its moving, 
storming, laughing, weeping, praying diagrams, sets forth in 
the concrete. 

But he who has not yet gained this point, — the critic who 
looks at it from the point of observation which the tradi- 
tionary theory of its origin and intent creates, is not in a 



THE PLAY. 285 

position to notice the philosophic expositions of its purport, 
with which the action is all inwoven. No, — though the whole 
structure of the piece should manifestly hang on them, 
though the whole flow of the dialogue should make one 
tissue of them, though every interstice of the play should 
be filled with them, though the fool's jest, and the Bedlamite's 
gibberish, should point and flash with them at every turn; — 
though the wildest incoherence of madness, real or assumed, 
to its most dubious hummings, — its snatches of old ballads, 
and inarticulate mockings of the blast, should be strung and 
woven with them ; though the storm itself, with its wild ac- 
companiment, and demoniacal frenzies, should articulate its 
response to them ; — keeping open tune without, to that human 
uproar; and howling symphonies, to the unconquered demonia- 
cal forces of human life, — for it is the Poet who writes in' the 
storm continues,' — ' the storm continues,' — ' the storm con- 
tinues;' — though even Edmund's diabolical '/«, sol, lah, mi, 1 
should dissolve into harmony with them, while Tom's five 
fiends echo it from afar, and ' mop and mow ' their responses, 
down to the one that ' since possesses chambermaids;' nobody 
that takes the play theory, and makes a matter of faith of it 
merely; nobody that is willing to shut his eyes and open his 
mouth, and swallow the whole upon trust, as a miracle 
simply, is going to see anything in all this, or take any 
exceptions at it. 

Certainly, at the time when it was written, it was not the 
kind of learning and the kind of philosophy that the world 
was used to. Nobody had ever heard of such a thing. The 
memory of man could not go far enough to produce any 
parallel to it in letters. It was manifest that this was nature, 
the living nature, the thing itself. None could perceive the 
tint of the school on its robust creations; no eye could detect 
in its sturdy compositions the stuff that books were made of; 
and it required no effort of faith, therefore, to believe that it 
was not that. It was easy enough to believe, and men were 
glad, on the whole, to believe that it was not that — that it 
was not learning or philosophy — but something just as far 



286 LEARNS philosopher. 

from that, as completely its opposite, as could well be con- 
ceived of. 

How could men suspect, as yet, that this was the new 
scholasticism, the New Philosophy? Was it strange that they 
should mistake it for rude nature herself, in her unschooled, 
spontaneous strength, when it had not yet publicly transpired 
that something had come at last upon the stage of human 
development, which was stooping to nature and learning of 
her, and stealing her secret, and unwinding the clue to the 
heart of her mystery? How could men know that this was 
the subtlest philosophy, the ripest scholasticism, the last proof 
of all human learning, when it was still a secret that the 
school of nature and her laws, that the school of natural 
history and natural philosophy, too, through all its lengths 
and breadths and depths, was open ; and that ' the schools' — 
the schools of old chimeras and notions — the schools where 
the jangle of the monkish abstractions and the ' fifes and the 
trumpets of the Greeks' were sounding — were going to get 
shut up with it. 

How should they know that the teacher of the New Philo- 
sophy was Poet also — must be, by that same anointing, a 
singer, mighty as the sons of song who brought their harmo- 
nies of old into the savage earth — a singer able to sing down 
antiquities with his new gift, able to sing in new eras? 

But these have no clue as yet to track him with : they can- 
not collect or thread his thick-showered meanings. He does 
not care through how many mouths he draws the lines of his 
philosophic purpose. He does not care from what long dis- 
tances his meanings look towards each other. But these 
interpreters are not aware of that. They have not been in- 
formed of that particular. On the contrary, they have been 
put wholly off their guard. Their heads have been turned, 
deliberately, in just the opposite direction. They have no 
faintest hint beforehand of the depths in which the philosophic 
unities of the piece are hidden: it is not strange, therefore, 
that these unities should escape their notice, and that they 
should take it for granted that there are none in it. It is not 



THE PLAY. 287 

the mere play-reader who is ever going to see them. It will 
take the philosophic student, with all his clues, to master 
them. It will take the student of the New School and the 
New Ages, with the torch of Natural Science in his hand, to 
track them to their centre. 

Here, too, as elsewhere, it is the king himself on whom the 
bolder political expositions are thrust. But it is not his 
royalty only that has need to be put in requisition here, to 
bring out successfully all that was working then in this Poet's 
mind and heart, and which had to come out in some way. It 
was something more than royalty that was required to protect 
this philosopher in those astounding freedoms of speech in 
which he indulges himself here, without any apparent scruple 
or misgiving. The combination of distresses, indeed, which 
the old ballad accumulates on the poor king's head, offers from 
the first a large poetic license, of which the man of art — or 
'■prudence, 1 as he calls it — avails himself somewhat liberally. 

With those daughters in the foreground always, and the 
parental grief so wild and loud — with that deeper, deadlier, 
infinitely more cruel private social wrong interwoven with all 
the political representation, and overpowering it everywhere, 
as if that inner social evil were, after all, foremost in the Poet's 
thought — as if that were the thing which seemed crying to 
him for redress more than all the rest — if, indeed, any thought 
of ' giving losses their remedies' could cross a Player's dream, 
when, in the way of his profession, ' the enormous state ' came 
in to fill his scene, and open its subterranean depths, and let 
out its secrets, and drown the stage with its elemental horror; 
— with his daughters in the foreground, and all that magni- 
ficent accompaniment of the elemental war without — with all 
nature in that terrific uproar, and the Fool and the Madman 
to create a diversion, and his friends all about him to htish up 
and make the best of everything — with that great storm of 
pathos that the Magician is bringing down for him — with the 
stage all in tears, by their own confession, and the audience 
sobbing their responses — what the poor king might say be- 
tween his chattering teeth was not going to be very critically 



288 leak's philosopher. 

treated; and the Poet knew it. It was the king, in such cir- 
cumstances, who could undertake the philosophical expositions 
of the action ; and in his wildest bursts of grief he has to 
manage them, in his wildest bursts of grief he has to keep 
to them. 

But it is not until long afterwards, when the storm, and all 
the misery of that night, has had its ultimate effect — its 
chronic effect — upon him, that the Poet ventures to produce, 
under cover of the sensation which the presence of a mad king 
on the stage creates, precisely that exposition of the scene 
which has been, here, insisted on. 

' They flattered me like a dog ; they told me I had white hairs in my 
beard, ere the black ones were there. To say Ay and No to every- 
thing 1 said ! — Ay and No too was no good divinity. When the ruin 
came to wet me once, and the wind made me chatter ; when the thunder 
would not peace at my bidding, — there 1 found them, there I smelt them 
out. Go to, they are not men of their words. They told me I was 
everything : 't is a lie. I am not ague-proof. 

Gloster. The trick of that voice I do well remember : 

Is 't not the king 1 
Lear. Ay, every inch a king : 

When / do stare, see, how the subject quakes! 

But it is a subject he has conjured up from his brain that is 
quaking under his regal stare. And it is the impersonation of 
God's authority, it is the divine right to rule men at its plea- 
sure, with or without laws, as it sees fit, that stands there, 
tricked out like Tom o' Bedlam, with A crown of noisome 
weeds on its head, arguing the question of the day, taking up 
for the divine right, denning its own position : — 

' Is 't not the king 1 

Ay every inch a king : 
When I do stare, see how the subject quakes! 

See ; yes, see. For that is what he stands there for, or that 
you may see what it is at whose stare the subject quakes. He 
is there to ' represent to the eye,' because impressions on the 
senses are more effective than abstract statements, the divine 
right and sovereignty, the majesty of the COMMON-weal, the 
rule that protects each helpless individual member of it with 



THE STATESMAN'S NOTE-BOOK. 289 

the strength of all, the rule awful with great nature's sanction, 
enforced with her dire pains and penalties. He is there that 
you may see whether that is it, or not; that one poor wretch, 
that thing of pity, which has no power to protect itself, in 
whom the law itself, the sovereignty of reason, is dethroned. 
That was, what all men thought it was, when this play was 
written; for the madness of arbitrary power, the impersonated 
will and passion, was the state then. That is the spontaneous 
affirmation of rude ages, on this noblest subject, — this chosen 
subject of the new philosophy, — which stands there now to faci- 
litate the demonstration, ' as globes and machines do the more 
subtle demonstrations in mathematics.' It is the ' affirmation' 
which the Poet finds pre-occupying this question; but this is 
the table of review that he stands on, and this 'Instance' has 
been subjected to the philosophical tests, and that is the reason 
that all those dazzling externals of majesty, which make that 
'idol ceremony' are wanting here; that is the reason that his 
crown has turned to weeds. This is the popular affirmative 
the Poet is dealing with ; but it stands on the scientific ' Table 
of Review' and the result of this inquiry is, that it goes to ' the 
table of negations.' And the negative table of science in 
these questions is Tragedy, the World's Tragedy. ' Is 't not 
the king?' f Ay, every inch — a King. When I do stare, see 
how the subject quakes.' But the voice within overpowers 
him, and the axioms that are the vintage of science, the in- 
ductions which are the result of that experiment, are forced 
from his lips. ' To say ay and no to everything that / — that 
I — said! To say ay and no too, was no GOOD divinity 
They told me that I was everything. 'T is A lie. I am 
not ague proof '.' 'Tis a lie' — that is, what is called in other 
places a ' negative? 

In this systematic exposure of ' the particular and private 
nature' in the human kind, and those special susceptibilities 
and liabilities which qualify its relationships ; in this scientific 
exhibition of its special liability to suffering from the violation 
of the higher law of those relationships — its special liability to 
injury, moral, mental, and physical — a liability from which 

u 



290 leak's philosopher. 

the very one who usurps the place of that law has himself no 
exemption in this exhibition, — which requires that the king 
himself should represent that liability in chief — it was not to 
be expected that this particular ill, this ill in which the human 
wrong in its extreme cases is so wont to exhibit its consum- 
mations, should be omitted. In this exhibition, which was 
designed to be scientifically inclusive, it would have been a 
fault to omit it. But that the Poet should have dared to 
think of exhibiting it dramatically in this instance, and that, 
too, in its most hopeless form — that he should have dared to 
think of exhibiting the personality which was then ' the state' 
to the eye of ' the subject' labouring under that personal dis- 
ability, in the very act, too, of boasting of its kingly terrors — 
this only goes to show what large prerogatives, what boundless 
freedoms and immunities, the resources of this particular 
department of art could be made to yield, when it fell into the 
hands of the new Masters of Arts, when it came to be selected 
by the Art-king himself as his instrument. 

But we are prepared for this spectacle, and with the Poet's 
wonted skill; for it is Cordelia, her heart bursting with its 
stormy passion of filial love and grief, that, REBEL- LIKE, 
seeks to be queen o'er her, though she queens it still, and 
4 the smiles on her ripe lips seem not to know what tears are 
in her eyes,' for she has had her hour with her subject grief, 
and ' dealt with it alone,' — it is this child of truth and duty, 
this true Queen, this impersonated sovereignty, whom her 
Poet crowns with his choicest graces, on whom he devolves the 
task of prefacing this so critical, and, one might think, per- 
haps, perilous exhibition. But her description does not disguise 
the matter, or palliate its extremity. 



Crowned • 



' Why, he was met even now, 
Mad as the vexed sea, singing aloud ;' 



'Crowned with rank fumiter, and furrow weeds, 
With hardocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckow flowers, 
Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow 
In our sustaining corn.' 



THE STATESMAN'S NOTE-BOOK. 2C)I 

That is the crown; and a very extraordinary symbol of 
sovereignty it is, one cannot help thinking, for the divine right 
to get on its head by any accident just then. Surely that symbol 
of power is getting somewhat rudely handled here, in the course 
of tire movements which the 'necessary questions of this Play' 
involve, as the critical mind might begin to think. In the 
botanical analysis of that then so dazzling, and potent, and 
compelling instrument in human affairs, a very careful ob- 
server might perhaps take notice that the decidedly hurtful 
and noxious influences in nature appear to have a prominent 
place; and, for the rest, that the qualities of mildness and idle- 
ness, and encroaching good-for-nothingness, appear to be 
the common and predominating elements. It is when the 
Tragedy reaches its height that this crown comes out. 

A hundred men are sent out to pursue this majesty; not 
now to wait on him in idle ceremony, and to give him the 
1 addition of a king' ; but — to catch him — to search every 
acre in the high-grown field, and bring him in. He has 
evaded his pursuers: he comes on to the stage full .of self- con- 
gratulation and royal glee, chuckling over his prerogative : — 

'No ; they cannot touch me for coining. lam the king himself? 

' O thou side-piercing sight !' [Collateral meaning.] 

' Nature 's above Art in that respect. [' So o'er that art which you say 
adds to nature, is an art that Nature makes.'] There's your pre3 b 
money. That fellow handles his bow like a crow-keeper : draw me a 
clothier's yard. — Look, look, a mouse ! Peace, peace ; this piece of 
toasted cheese will do't. — There's my gauntlet ; I'll prove it on a giant? 

But the messengers, who were sent out for him, are on his 
track. 

Enter a Gentleman, with Attendants. 
Gent. O here he is, lay hand upon him. Sir, 

Your most dear daughter — 
Lear. No rescue 1 What, a prisoner ? I am even 
The natural fool of fortune ! Use me well ; 
You shall have ransom. Let me have a surgeon, 
I am cut to the brains. 
Gent. You shall have anything. 
Lear. No seconds 1 All myself 1 * * * 
Gent. Good Sir, — 

u 2 



292 leak's philosopher. 

Lear. I will die bravely, like a bridegroom : What % 
I will be jovial. Come, come ; / am a Icing, 
My masters ; know you that ? 
Gent. You are, a royal one, and we obey you. 

Lear. Then there's life in it. Nay, an you get it, you shall get it by 
running. Sa, sa, sa, sa. [Exit, running ; Attendants follow. 

['Transient hieroglyphic.'] 
Gent. A sight most pitiful in the meanest wretch ; 
Past speaking of, in a king ! 

[not past exhibiting, it seems, however.] 

But, of course, there was nothing that a king, whose mind 
was in such a state, could not be permitted to say with im- 
punity; and it is in this very scene that the Poet puts into his 
mouth the boldest of those philosophical suggestions which 
the first attempt to find a theory for the art and practical part 
of life, gave birth to : he skilfully reserves for this scene some 
of the most startling of those social criticisms which the action 
this play is everywhere throwing out. 

For it is in this scene, that the outcast king encounters the 
victim of tyranny, whose eyes have been plucked out, and 
who has been turned out to beggary, as the penalty of having 
come athwart that disposition in ' the duke,' that ' all the 
world well knows will not be rubbed or stopped ' ; — it is in 
this scene that Lear finds him smelling his way to Dover, for 
that is the name in the play — the play name — for the place 
towards which men's hopes appear to be turning; and that 
conversation as to how the world goes, to which allusion has 
been already made, comes off, without appearing to suggest to 
any mind, that it is other than accidental on the part of the 
Poet, or that the action of the play might possibly be con- 
nected with it ! For notwithstanding this great stress, which 
he lays everywhere on forethought and a deliberative rational 
intelligent procedure, as the distinctive human mark, — the cha- 
racteristic feature of a man, — the poor poet himself, does not 
appear to have gained much credit hitherto for the possession 
of this human quality. — 

Lear. Thou seest how this world goes ? 
Gloster. I see it feelingly. 
Lear. What, art mad ? — 



THE STATESMAN'S NOTE-BOOK. 293 

[have you not the use of your reason, then? Can you not see 
with that? That is the kind of sight we talk of here. It's 
the want of that which makes these falls. We have eyes with 
which to foresee effects, — eyes which outgo all the senses with 
their range of observation, with their range of certainty and 
foresight.] 

' What, art mad ? A man may see how this world goes with no eyes. 
Look with thine — ears : see how yon justice rails upon yon simple thief. 
Hark, in thine ear : Change places, and, handy-dandy, tohich is the justice, 
and which is the thief ? ' [Searching social questions, as before. 
' Thou robed man of justice (to the Bedlamite), take thy place ; and 
thou, his yoke-fellow of equity (to the Fool), bench by his side. Thou, 
sapient sir, sit here.'] 

So that it would seem, perhaps, as if wisdom, as well as 
honesty, might be wanting there — the searching subtle wisdom, 
that is matched in subtilty, with nature's forces, that sees true 
differences, and effects true reformations. ' Change places. 
Hark, in thine ear.' Truly this is a player who knows how to 
suit the word to the action, and the action to the word; for 
there has been a revolution going on in this play which has 
made as complete a social overturning — which has shaken 
kings, and dukes, and lordlings out of their 'places,' as com- 
pletely as some later revolutions have done. ' Change places !' 
With one duke in the stocks, and another wandering blind in 
the streets — with a dukeling, in the form of mad Tom, to 
lead him, with a king in a hovel, calling for the straw, and 
a queen hung by the neck till she is dead — with mad Tom 
on the bench, and the Fool, with his cap and bells, at his side 
— with Tom at the council-table, and occupying the position 
of chief favourite and adviser to the king, and a distinct pro- 
posal now that the thief and the justice shall change places 
on the spot — with the inquiry as to which is the justice, and 
which is the thief, openly started — one would almost fancy 
that the subject had been exhausted here, or would be, if these 
indications should be followed up. What is it in the way of 
social alterations which the player's imagination could conceive 
of, which his scruples have prevented him from suggesting 
here? 



294 leak's philosophek. 

But the mad king goes on with those new and unheard-of 
political and social suggestions, which his madness appears to 
have had the effect of inspiring in him — 

Lear. Thou hast seen a farmer's dog bark at a beggar ? 

Gloster. Ay, sir. 

Lear. And the creature run from the cur? There might'st thou 

behold the great image of Authority : a dog's obeyed in office. 

Through tattered robes small vices do appear ; 

Robes, and furred gowns, hide all. 

[Robes, — robes, and furred gowns !] 
Plate sin with gold, 

And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks ; 

Arm it with rags, a pigmy's straw doth pierce it. 

But that was before Tom got his seat on the bench — that was 
before Tom got his place at the council-table. 

' None does offend, — none — ' 

[unless you will begin your reform at the beginning, and hunt 
down the great rogues as well as the little ones; or, rather, 
unless you will go to the source of the evil, and take away the 
evils, of which these crimes, that you are awarding penalties 
to, are the result, let it all alone, I say. Let's have no more 
legislation, and no more of this JUSTICE, this equity, that takes 
the vices which come through the tattered robes, and leaves 
the great thief 'in his purple untouched. Let us have no more 
of this mockery. Let us be impartial in our justice, at least.] 
' None does offend. I saij none. Vll able 'em.' [I'll show 
you the way. Soft. Hark, in thine ear.'] ' Take that of me, 
my friend, who have the power TO SEAL the accuser's lips.' 
[Soft, in thine ear.] — 

' Get thee glass eyes, 
And like a scurvy politician, seem 
To see the things thou dost not. — Now, now, now, now. 
* * * * 

I know thee well enough. Thy name is — Gloster. 
Thou must be patient ; we came crying hither. 
Thou know'st the first time that we smell the air 
We wawl and cry. I will preach to thee ; mark me. 



THE STATESMAN'S NOTE-BOOK. 295 

Gloster. Alack, alack, the day / 

Lear. When we are born, we cry that we are come 

To this great stage of — Fools. 

[Mark me, for I preach to thee — of Fools. 

I am even the natural fool of fortune.'] 

— ' O matter and impertinency, mixed 

Keason in madness.' — 

— is the Poet's concluding comment on this regal boldness, a 
safe and saving explanation; 'for to define true madness,' as 
Polonius says, 'what is it but to be nothing else but mad/ If 
the ' all licensed fool,' as Goneril peevishly calls him, under 
cover of his assumed imbecility, could carry his traditional 
privilege to such dangerous extremes, and carp and philosophize, 
and fling his bitter jests about at his pleasure, surely downright 
madness might claim to be invested with a privilege as large. 
But madness, when conjoined with royalty, makes a double 
privilege, one which this Poet finds, however, at times, none 
too large for his purposes. 

Thus, Hamlet, when his mind is once in a questionable state, 
can be permitted to make, with impunity, profane suggestions 
as to certain possible royal progresses, and the changes to 
which the dust of a Ceesar might be liable, without being re- 
minded out of the play, that to follow out these suggestions 
' would be/ indeed, ' to consider too curiously,' and that most 
extraordinary humour of his enables him also to relieve his 
mind of many other suggestions, ' which reason and sanity,' in 
his time, could not have been c so prosperously delivered of/ 

For what is it that men can set up as a test of sanity in any 
a<re, but their own common beliefs and sentiments. And what 
surer proof of the king's madness, — what more pathetic indi- 
cation of its midsummer height could be given, than those 
startling propositions which the poet here puts into his mouth, 
so opposed to the opinions and sentiments, not of kings only, 
but of the world at large; what madder thing could a poet 
think of than those political axioms which he introduces under 
cover of these suggestions, — which would lay the axe at the 
root of the common beliefs and sentiments ou which the social 



296 lear's philosopher. 

structure then rested. How could he better show that this 
poor king's wits had, indeed, ' turned ;' how could he better 
prove that he was, indeed, past praying for, than by putting 
into his mouth those bitter satires on the state, those satires on 
the ' one only man' power itself, — those wild revolutionary 
proposals, ( hark ! in thine ear, — change places. Softly, in 
thine ear, — which is the justice, and which is the thief ?' 
' Take that of me who have the power to seal the accuser's lips. 
None does offend. I say none. I'll able 'em. Look when I 
stare, see how the subject quakes.' These laws have failed, you 
see. They shelter the most frightful depths of wrong. That 
Bench has failed, you see; and that Chair, with all its adjunct 
divinity. Come here and look down with me from this pinna- 
cle, into these abysses. Look at that wretch there, in the form 
of man. Fetch him up in his blanket, and set him at the 
Council Table with his elf locks and begrimed visage and in- 
human gibberish. Perhaps, he will be able to make some sug- 
gestion there; and those five fiends that are talking in him at 
once, would like, perhaps, to have a hearing there. Make 
him ' one of your hundred.' You are of ' the commission,' 1 let 
him bench with you. Nay, change places, let him try your 
cause, and tell us which is the justice, which is the thief, which 
is the sapient Sir, and which is the Bedlamite. Surely, the 
man who authorizes these suggestions must be, indeed, ' far 
gone,' whether he be ' a king or a yeoman.' And mad indeed 
he is. Writhing under the insufficiency and incompetency # of 
these pretentious, but, in fact, ignorant and usurping institu- 
tions, his heart of hearts racked and crushed with their failure, 
the victim of this social empiricism, cries out in his anguish, 
under that safe disguise of the Robes that hide all : ' Take 
these away at least, — that will be something gained. Let us 
have no more of this mockery. None does offend — none — 
I say none' Let us go back to the innocent instinctive brutish 
state, and have done with this vain disastrous struggle of nature 
after the human form, and its dignity, and perfection. Let us 
talk no more of law and justice and humanity and divinity 
forsooth, divinity and the celestial graces, that divinity which 



THE STATESMAN'S NOTE-BOOK. 297 

is the end and perfection of the human form. — Is not woman- 
hood itself, and the Angel of it fallen — degenerate?' — That is 
the humour of it. — That is the meaning of the savage edicts, 
in which this human victim of the inhuman state, the subject of 
a social state which has failed in some way of the human end, 
undertakes to utter through the king's lips, his sense of the 
failure. For the Poet at whose command he speaks, is the true 
scientific historian of nature and art, and the rude and strug- 
gling advances of the human nature towards its ideal type, 
though they fall never so short, are none of them omitted in 
his note-book. He knows better than any other, what gain 
the imperfect civilization he searches and satirizes and lays bare 
here, has made, with all its imperfections, on the spontaneities 
and aids of the individual, unaccommodated man: he knows 
all the value of the accumulations of ages ; he is the very phi- 
losopher who has put forth all his wisdom to guard the state 
from the shock of those convulsions, that to his prescient eye, 
were threatening then to lay all flat. 

' let him pass ! ' is the Poet's word, when the loving 
friends seek to detain a little longer, the soul on whom this 
cruel time has done its work, — its elected sufferer. 
' let him pass ! he hates him 

That would upon the rack of this tough world, 

Stretch him out longer.' 

[Tired with all these, he cries in his own behalf.] 

' Tired with all these, for restful death I cry. 
Thou seest how this world goes. I see it feelingly? 

Albany. The weight of this sad time we must obey, 

Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say, 
The oldest hath borne most : we that are young 
Shall never see so much, nor live so long. 

It needs but a point, a point which the Poet could not well 
put in, — one of those points which he speaks of elsewhere so 
significantly, to make the unmeaning line with which this 
great social Tragedy concludes, a sufficiently fitting conclusion 
for it; considering, at least, the pressure under which it was 
written; and the author has himself called our attention to 
that, as we see, even in this little jingle of rhymes, put in 



298 lear's philosopher. 

apparently, only for professional purposes, and merely to get 
the curtain down decently. It is a point, which it takes the 
key of the play — Lord Bacon's key, of ' Times/ to put in. 
It wants but a comma, but then it must be a comma in the 
right place, to make English of it. Plain English, unvar- 
nished English, but poetic in its fact, as any prophecy that 
Merlin was to make. 

' The oldest hath borne most, we that are young 
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.' 

There were boys ' in England then a-bed ;' nay, Some of 
them might have been present that day, for aught we know, 
on which one of the Managers of the Surrey Theatre, the 
owner of the wardrobe and stage-properties, and himself an 
actor, brought out with appropriate decorations and dresses, 
for the benefit of his audience on the Bankside, this little 
ebullition of his genius; — there were boys present then, per- 
haps, whose names would become immortal with the fulfil- 
ment of that prophecy ; — there was one at Whitehall, when 
it was brought out there, whose name would be for ever linked 
with it. ' We that are young, — the oldest hath borne most. 
We that are young shall never see so much' [I see it feelingly], 

1 Shall never see so much, nor live so, long! 

So. 

But there were evils included in that tragic picture, which 
those who were young then, would nut outlive; evils which 
the times that were near with their coarse, fierce remedies, 
would not heal ; evils which the Seer and Leader of the Times 
that were far off, would himself make over to their cure; — evils 
in whose cure the Discoverer of the science of Nature, and the 
inventor of the New Magic which is the part operative of it, 
expected to be called upon for an opinion, when the time 
for that extension of his science, ' crushed together and infolded 
within itself in these books of Nature's learning, should fully 
come. 

Nothing almost sees miracles but misery, says poor Kent, 
in the stocks, waiting for the ' beacon' of the morning, by 



THE PLAY. 299 

whose comfortable beams, he might peruse his letter. ' I know,' 
he says, 

1 "lis from Cordelia, 
Who hath most fortunately been informed 
Of my obscured course, and shall find time 
From this enormous state — seeking — to give 
Losses their remedies.' 

There is no attempt to demonstrate that the work here pro- 
posed as a study, worthy the attention of the philosophical 
student, is not, notwithstanding a Poem, and a Poet's gift, 
not to his cotemporaries only, but to his kind. What is 
claimed is, indeed, that it is a Poem which, with all its over- 
powering theatrical effects, does, in fact, reserve its true 
poetic wealth, for those who will find the springs of its in- 
most philosophic purport. There is no attempt to show that 
this play belongs to the category of scientific works, according 
to our present limitation of the term, or that there could be 
found any niche for it, on those lower platforms and compart- 
ments of the new science of nature, which our modern works 
of natural science occupy. 

It was inevitably a Poem. There was the essence of all 
Tragedy in the purely scientific exhibition, which the purpose 
of it required. The intention of the Poet to exhibit the 
radical idea of his plot impressively, so as to reach the popular 
mind through its appeal to the sensibilities, involved, of 
course, the finest series of conjunctions of artistic effects, the 
most exquisite characterization, the boldest grouping, the 
most startling and determined contrasts, which the whole 
range of his art could furnish. 

But that which is only the incident of a genuine poetic in- 
spiration, the effect upon the senses, which its higher appeals 
are sure to involve, becomes with those delighting in, and 
capable of appreciating, that sensuous effect merely, its suffi- 
cient and only end, and even a doctrine of criticism based on 
this inversion will not be wanting. But the difficulty of un- 
locking the great Elizabethan poems with any such theory of 
Art, arises from the fact that it is not the theory of Art, which 



300 LEAR'S philosopher. 

the great Elizabethan Poets adopted, and whether we approve 
of theirs or not, we must take it, such as it was, for our torch 
in this exploration. As to that spontaneity, that seizure, that 
Platonic divination, that poetic ' fury/ which our prose philo- 
sopher scans in so many places so curiously, which he defines 
so carefully and strictly, so broadly too, as the poetic condition, 
that thing which he appears to admire so much, as having 
something a little demoniacal in it withal, that same ' fine' 
thing which the Poet himself speaks of by a term not any less 
questionable, — as to this poetic inspiration, it is not necessary 
to claim that it is a thing with which this Poet, the Poet of a 
new era, the Poet, the deliverer of an Inductive Learning, has 
had himself, personally, no acquaintance. He knows what it 
is. But it is a Poet who is, first of all, a man, and he takes 
his humanity with him into all things. The essential human 
principle is that which he takes to be the law and limit of the 
human constitution. He is perfectly satisfied with ' the mea- 
sure of a man,' and he gives the preference deliberately, and 
on principle to the sober and rational state in the human mind. 
All the elements which enter into the human composition, all 
the states, normal or otherwise, to which it is liable, have 
passed under his review, and this is his conclusion; and none 
born of woman, ever had a better chance to look at them, for 
all is alike heightened in him, — heightened to the ideal boun- 
dary of nature, in the human form ; but that which seems to 
be heightened, most of all, that in which he stands preeminent 
and singular in the natural history of man, would seem to be 
the proportion of this heightening. It is what we have all 
recognized it to be, Nature's largest, most prodigal demonstra- 
tion of her capacities in the human form, but it is, at the same 
time, her most excellent and exquisite balance of composition 
— her most subdued and tempered work. And the reason is, 
that he is not a particular and private man, and the deficien- 
cies and personalities of those from whom he is abstracted, are 
studiously, and by method, kept out of him. For this is the 
'Will' not of one man only; it is the scientific abstract of a phi- 
losophic union. It is a will that has a rule in art as well as 
nature. 



THE PLAT. 301 

Certainly lie is the very coolest Poet; and the fullest of this 
common earth and its affairs, of any sage that has ever showed 
his head upon it, in prose or metre. The sturdiness with 
which he makes good his position, as an inhabitant, for the 
time being, of this terrestrial ball, and, by the ordinance of 
God, subject to its laws, and liable to its pains and penalties, 
is a thing which appears, to the careful reviewer of it, on the 
whole, the most novel and striking feature of this demonstra- 
tion. He objects, on principle, to seizures and possessions of 
all kinds. He refuses to be taken off his feet by any kind of 
solicitation. He is a man who is never ashamed to have a 
reason,— one that he can produce, and make intelligible to 
common people, for his most exquisite proceedings; that is, if 
he chooses: but, ' if reasons were plentiful as blackberries,' he 
is not the man to give them on ' compulsion/ His ideas of 
the common mind, his notion of the common human intelli- 
gence, or capacity for intelligence, appears to be somewhat 
different from that of the other philosophers. The common 
sense — the common form — is that which he is always seeking 
and identifying under all the differences. It is that which he 
is bringing out and clothing with the e inter-tissued robe' and 
all the glories which he has stripped from the extant majesty. 
( Robes and furred gowns hide all ' no longer. 

He is not a bard who is careful at all about keeping his 
singing robes about him. He can doff them and work like a 
'navvy' when he sees reason. He is very fond of coming out 
with good, sober, solid prose, in the heart of his poetry. He 
can rave upon occasion as well as another. Spontaneities of all 
kinds have scope and verge enough in his plot; but he always 
keeps an eye out, and they speak no more than is set down 
for them. His Pythoness foams at the mouth too, sometimes, 
and appears to have it all her own way, perhaps; but he 
knows what she is about, and there is never a word in the 
oracle that has not undergone his revision. He knows that 
Plato tells us ' it is in vain for a sober man to knock at the 
door of the Muses'; but he is one who has discovered, scien- 
tifically, the human law; and he is. ready to make it good, on 



302 LEAR S PHILOSOPHER. 

all sides, against all comers. And, though the Muses knocked 
at his door, as they never had at any other, they could never 
carry him away with them. They found, for once, a sober 
man within, one who is not afraid to tell them, to their teeth, 
' Judgment holds in me, always, a magisterial seat;' — and, 
with all their celestial graces and pretensions, he fetters them, 
and drags them up to that tribunal. He superintends all his 
inspirations. 

There never was a Poet in whom the poetic spontaneities 
were so absolutely under control and mastery ; and there never 
was one in whose nature all the spontaneous force and faculty 
of genius showed itself in such tumultuous fulness, ready to 
issue, at a word, in such inexhaustible varieties of creative 
energy. 

Of all the spirits that tend on mortal thoughts there is none 
to match this so delicate and gorgeous Ariel of his, — this 
creature that he keeps to put his girdles round the earth for 
him, that comes at a thought, and brings in such dainty ban- 
quets, such brave pageants in the earth or in the air; there is 
none other that knows so well the spells ' to make this place 
Paradise.' But, for all that, he is the merest tool, — the veriest 
drudge and slave. The magician's collar is always on his 
neck ; in his airiest sweeps he takes his chain with him. Cali- 
ban himself is not more sternly watched and tutored; and all 
the gorgeous masque has its predetermined order, its severe 
economy of grace; through all the slightest minutiae of its 
detail, runs the inflexible purpose, the rational human purpose, 
the common human sense, the common human aim. 

Yes, it is a Play; but it is the play of a mind sobered 
with all human learning. Yes, it is spontaneous; but it is the 
spontaneity of a heart laden with human sorrow, oppressed 
with the burthen of the common weal. Yes, indeed, it is a 
Poet's work; but it is the work of one who consciously and 
deliberately recognizes, in all the variety of his gifts, in all his 
natural and acquired power, under all the disabilities of his 
position, the one, paramount, human law, and essential obliga- 
tion. Of ' Art,' as anything whatever, but an instrumentality, 



THE PLAY. 303 

* 

thoroughly subdued, and subordinated to that end, of Art as 
anything in itself, with an independent tribunal, and law with 
an ethic and ritual of its own, this inventor of the one Art, 
that has for its end the relief of the human estate and the 
Creator's glory, knows nothing. Of any such idolatry and 
magnifying of the creature, of any such worship of the gold 
of the temple to the desecration of that which sanctifieth the 
gold, this Art-King in all his purple, this priest and High 
Pontiff of its inner mysteries knows — will know — nothing. 

Yes, it is play; but it is not child's play, nor an idiots play, 
nor the play of a ' jigging ' Bacchanal, who comes out on this 
grave, human scene, to insult our sober, human sense, with his 
mad humour, making a Belshazzar's feast or an Antonian revel 
of it; a creature who shows himself to our common human 
sense without any human aim or purpose, ransacking all the life 
of man, exploring all worlds, pursuing the human thought to its 
last verge, and questioning, as with the cry of all the race, the 
infinities beyond, diving to the lowest depths of human life 
and human nature, and bringing up and publishing, the before 
unspoken depths of human wrong and sorrow, wringing from 
the hearts of those that died and made no sign, their death- 
buried secrets, articulating everywhere that which before had 
no word — and all for an artistic effect, for an hour's entertain- 
ment, for the luxury of a harmonized .impression, or for the 
mere ostentation of his frolic, to feed his gamesome humour, 
to make us stare at his unconsciousness, to show what gems he 
can crush in his idle cup for a draught of pleasure, or in pure 
caprice and wantonness, confounding all our notions of sense, 
and manliness, and human duty and respect, with the bound- 
less wealth and waste of his gigantic fooleries. 

It is play, but let us thank God it is no such play as that; 
let our common human naturer ejoice that it has not been thus 
outraged in its chief and chosen one, that it has not been thus 
disgraced with the boundless human worthlessness of the 
creature on whom its choicest gifts were lavished. It is play, 
indeed ; but it is no such Monster, with his idiotic stare of un- 
consciousness, that the opening of it will reveal to us. Let us 



304 LEAR S PHILOSOPHER. 

all thank God, and take heart again, and try to revive those 
notions of human dignity and common human sense which 
this story sets at nought, and see if we cannot heal that great 
jar in our abused natures which this chimera of the nineteenth 
century makes in it — this night-mare of modern criticism, 
which lies with its dead weight on all our higher art and 
learning — this creature that came in on us unawares, when 
the interpretation of the Plays had outgrown the Play-tradi- 
tion, when ' the Play' had outgrown ' the Player.' 

It is a play in which the manliest of human voices is heard 
sounding throughout the order of it; it is a play stuffed to its 
fool's gibe, with the soberest, deepest, maturest human sense; 
and ' the tears of it,' as we who have tested it know, ' the 
tears of it are wet.' It is a play where the choicest seats, the 
seats in which those who see it all must sit, are ' reserved' ; and 
there is a price to be paid for these : ' children and fools' will 
continue to have theirs for nothing. For after so many gener- 
ations of players had come and gone, there had come at 
last on this human stage — on ' this great stage of fools/ as the 
Poet calls it — this stage filled with ' the natural fools of for- 
tune,' having eyes, but seeing not — there had come to it at 
last a man, one who was — take him for all in all — that; one 
who thought it — for a man, enough to be truly that — one 
who thought he was fulfilling his part in the universal order, 
in seeking to be modestly and truly that; one, too, who thought 
it was time that the human part on the stage of this Globe 
Theatre should begin to be reverently studied by man him- 
self, and scientifically and religiously ordered and determined 
through all its detail. 

For it is the movement of the new time that makes this 
Play, and all these Plays: it is the spirit of the newly -begin- 
ning ages of human advancement which makes the inspiration 
of them ; the beginning ages of a rational, instructed — and 
not blind, or instinctive, or demoniacal — human conduct. 

It is such play and pastime as the prophetic spirit and leader- 
ship of those new ages could find time and heart to make and 
leave to them, on that height of vision which it was given to 



THE STATESMAN'S NOTE-BOOK. 305 

it to occupy. For an age in human advancement was at last 
reached, on whose utmost summits men could begin to perceive 
that tradition, and eyes of moonshine speculation, and a 
thousand noses, and horns welked and waved like the en- 
ridged sea, when they came to be jumbled together in one 
■ monster/ did not appear to answer the purpose of human 
combination, or the purpose of human life on earth; appeared, 
indeed to be still far, 'far wide' of the end which human 
society is everywhere blindly pushing and groping for, en 
masse. 

There was a point of observation from which this fortuitous 
social conjunction did not appear to the critical eye or ear to 
be making just that kind of play and music which human 
nature — singularly enough, considering what kind of condi- 
tions it lights on — is constitutionally inclined to expect and 
demand ; not that, or indeed any perceptible approximation to 
a paradisaical state of things. There was, indeed, a point of 
view — one which commanded not the political mysteries of 
the time only, but the household secrets of it, and the deeper 
secrets of the solitary heart of man, one which commanded 
alike the palace and the hovel, to their blackest recesses^ — 
there was a point of view from which these social agencies ap- 
peared to be making then, in fact, whether one looked with 
eyes or ears, a mere diabolical jangle, and l fa, sol, la, mi,' of 
it, a demoniacal storm music; and from that height of obser- 
vation all ruinous disorders could be seen coming out, and 
driving men to vice and despair, urging them to self-destruc- 
tion even, and hunting them disquietly to their graves. 
1 Nothing almost sees miracles but misery/ and this was the 
Age in which the New Magic was invented. 

It was the age in which that grand discovery was made, which 
the Fool undertakes to palm off here as the fruit of his own 
single invention ; and, indeed, it was found that the application 
of it to certain departments of human affairs was more success- 
fully managed by this gentleman in his motley, than by some 
of his brother philosophers who attempted it. It was the age 
in which the questions which are inserted here so safely in the 

x 



306 lear's philosopher. 

Fool's catechism, began to be started secretly in the philo- 
sophic chamber. It was the age in which the identical answers 
which the cap and bells are made responsible for here, were 
written down, but with other applications, in graver authori- 
ties. It is the philosophical discovery of the time, which the 
Fool is undertaking to translate into the vernacular, when he 
puts the question, ' Canst thou tell why one's nose stands in 
the middle of his face?' And we have all the Novum Organum 
in what he calls, in another place, ' the boorish/ when he 
answers it; and all the choicest gems of ' the part operative' of 
the new learning have been rattling from his rattle in every- 
body's path, ever since he published his digests of that doc- 
trine : ' Canst thou tell why one's nose stands in the middle of 
his face?' ' No.' ' Why, to keep his eyes on either side of it, 
that what he cannot smell out he may spy into.' And ' all 
that follow their noses are led by their eyes, but — blind men' 
And ' the reason why the seven stars are seven, is because they 
are not eight;' and the king who makes that answer ' would 
have made a good — fool,' for it's 'a very pretty reason.' And 
neither times nor men should be 'old before their time'; 
neither times nor men should be revered, or clothed with autho- 
rity or command in human affairs, ' till they are wise.' [' Thou 
sapient sir, sit here.'~\ And it is a mistake for a leader of men 
to think that he ' has white hairs in his beard, before the black 
ones are there.' And 'ants,' and 'snails,' and ' oysters,' are wiser 
than men in their arts, and practices, and pursuits of ends. It 
was the age in which it was perceived that ' to say ay and no 
to everything' that a madman says, ' is no good divinity' ; and 
that it is ' the time's plague when Madmen lead the Blind ' ; 
and that, instead of good men sitting still, like ' moral fools,' 
and crying out on wrong and mischief, ' iUack, why does it 
so?' it would be wiser, and more pious, too, to make use of the 
faculty of learning, with which the Creator has armed Man, 
'against diseases of the world,' to ascend to the cause, and punish 
that — punish that, ' ere it has done its mischief.' It was the 
age in which it was discovered that ' the sequent effect, with 
which nature finds itself scourged,' is not in the least touched 



THE STATESMAN S NOTE-BOOK. 307 

by any kind of reasoning ' thus and thus,' except that kind 
which proceeds first by negatives, that kind which proceeds 
by a method so severe that it contrives to exclude everything 
but the ' the cause in nature 1 from its affirmation, which ' in 
practical philosophy becomes the rule ' — that is, the critical 
method, — which is for men, as distinguished from the sponta- 
neous affirmation, which is for gods. 

It is the beginning of these yet beginning Modern Ages, 
the ages of a practical learning, and scientific relief to the 
human estate, which this Pastime marks with its blazoned, 
illuminated initial. It is the opening of the era in which a 
common human sense is developed, and directed to the common- 
weal, which this Pastime celebrates ; the opening of the ages in 
which, ere all is done, the politicians who expect mankind to 
entrust to them their destinies, will have to find something 
better than ' glass eyes' to guide them with ; in which it will 
be no longer competent for those to whom mankind entrusts 
its dearest interests to go on in their old stupid, conceited, 
heady courses, their old, blind, ignorant courses, — stumbling, 
and staggering, and groping about, and smelling their way 
with their own narrow and selfish instincts, when it is the 
common-weal they have taken on their shoulders ; — running 
foul of the nature of things — quarrelling with eternal neces- 
sities, and crying out, when the wreck is made, ' Alack ! why 
does it so?' 

This Play, and all these plays, were meant to be pastime for 
ages in which state reasons must needs be something else than 
* the pleasure' of certain individuals, ' whose disposition, all the 
world well knows, will not be rubbed or stopped;' or 'the 
quality,' ' fiery' or otherwise, of this or that person, no matter 
' how unremoveable and fixed' he may be ' in his own course.' 

It was to the ' far off times;' and not to the ' near,' it was to 
the advanced ages of the Advancement of Learning, that this 
Play was dedicated by its Author. For it was the spirit of the 
modern ages that inspired it. It was the new Prometheus 
who planned it; the more aspiring Titan, who would bring 
down in his New Organum a new and more radiant gift; it 

x 2 



308 lear's philosopher. 

was the Benefactor and Foreseer, who would advance the rude 
kind to new and more enviable approximations to the celestial 
summits. He knew there would come a time, in the inevit- 
able advancements of that new era of scientific 'prudence' and 
forethought which it was given to him to initiate, when all 
this sober historic exhibition, with its fearful historic earnest, 
would read, indeed, like some old fable of the rude barbaric 
past — some Player's play, bent on a feast of horrors — some 
Poet's impossibility. And that — was the Play, — that was the 
Plot. He knew that there would come a time when all this tragic 
mirth — sporting with the edged tools of tyranny — playing a 
round the edge of the great axe itself — would be indeed safe 
play; when his Fool could open his budget, and unroll his 
bitter jests — crushed together and infolded within themselves 
so long — and have a world to smile with him, and not the 
few who could unfold them only. And that — that was ' the 
humour of it.' 

Yes, with all their philosophy, these plays are Plays and 
Poems still. There 's no spoiling the ( tragical mirth' in them. 
But we are told, on the most excellent contemporaneous 
authority — on the authority of one who was in the inmost 
heart of all this Poet's secrets — that ' as we often judge of 
the greater by the less, so the very pastimes of great men 
give an honourable idea to the clear-sighted of the SOURCE 

PROM WHICH THEY SPRING.' 



JULIUS CAESAR; 



OR, 

THE EMPIRICAL TREATMENT IN DISEASES OF THE 
COMMON- WEAL EXPLAINED. 

Good does not necessarily succeed evil ; another evil may succeed, 
and a worse, as it happened with Caesar's killers, who brought the 
republic to such a pass that they had reason to repent their meddling 
with it. * * * It must be examined in what condition the 
assailant is. — Michael de Montaigne. 

Citizen. I fear there will a worse one come in his place. 

Cassius. He were no lion, were not Romans hinds. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE DEATH OF TYRANNY; OR, THE QUESTION OF THE 
PREROGATIVE. 

Casca. 'Tis Caesar that you mean : Is it not, Cassius? 

Cassius. Let it be who it is, for Romans now 

Have thewes and limbs like to their ancestors. 
* * * * 

We all stand up against the spirit of Caesar. 

Julius Caesar. 

XTES, when that Eoyal Injunction, which rested alike upon 
-*- the Play-house, the Press, the Pulpit, and Parliament 
itself, was still throttling everywhere the free voice of the 
nation — when a single individual could still assume to himself, 
or to herself, the exclusive privilege of deliberating on all 
those questions which men are most concerned in — questions 
which involve all their welfare, for this life and the life to 
come, certainly ' the Play, the Play was the thing. 1 It was a 
vehicle of expression which offered incalculable facilities for 
evading these restrictions. It was the only one then invented 
which ofTered then any facilities whatever for the discussion 
of that question in particular — which was already for that age 
the question. And to the genius of that age, with its new 



310 JULIUS CAESAR. 

historical, experimental, practical, determination — with its 
transcendant poetic power, nothing could be easier than to get 
possession of this instrument, and to exhaust its capabilities. 

For instance, if a Koman Play were to be brought out at 
all, — and with that mania for classical subjects which then 
prevailed, what could be more natural ? — how could one 
object to that which, by the supposition, was involved in it? 
And what but the most boundless freedoms and audacities, on 
this very question, could one look for here? What, by the 
supposition, could it be but one mine of poetic treason ? If 
Brutus and Cassius were to be allowed to come upon the stage, 
and discuss their views of government, deliberately and confi- 
dentially, in the presence of an English audience, certainly no 
one could ask to hear from their lips the political doctrine then 
predominant in England. It would have been a flat anachro- 
nism, to request them to keep an eye upon the Tower in their 
remarks, inasmuch as all the world knew that the corner-stone 
of that ancient and venerable institution had only then just 
been laid by the same distinguished individual whom these 
patriots were about to call to an account for his military 
usurpation of a constitutional government at home. 

And yet, one less versed than the author in the mystery of 
theatrical effects, and their combinations — one who did not 
know fully what kind of criticism a mere Play, composed by 
a professional play-wright, in the way of his profession, for 
the entertainment of the spectators, and for the sake of the 
pecuniary result, was likely to meet with ; — or one who did 
not know what kind of criticism a work, addressed so strongly 
to the imagination and the feelings in any form, is likely to 
meet with, might have fancied beforehand that the author was 
venturing upon a somewhat delicate experiment, in producing 
a play like this upon the English stage at such a crisis. One 
would have said beforehand, that ' there were things in this 
comedy of Julius Caesar that would never please.' It is diffi- 
cult, indeed, to understand how such a Play as this could ever 
have been produced in the presence of either of those two 
monarchs who occupied the English throne at that crisis in its 



THE DEATH OF TYRANNY. 311 

history, already secretly conscious that its foundations were 
moving, and ferociously on guard over their prerogative. 

And, indeed, unless a little of that same sagacity, which was 
employed so successfully in reducing the play of Pyramus and 
Thisbe to the tragical capacities of Duke Theseus' court, had 
been put in requisition here, instead of that dead historical 
silence, which the world complains of so much, we might 
have been treated to some very lively historical details in this 
case, corresponding to other details which the literary history 
of the time exhibits, in the case of authors who came out in 
an evil hour in their own names, with precisely the same doc- 
trines, which are taught here word for word, with impunity; 
and the question as to whether this Literary Shadow, this 
Name, this Veiled Prophet in the World of Letters, ever had 
any flesh and blood belonging to him anywhere, (and from the 
tenor of his works, one might almost fancy sometimes that that 
might have been the case), this question would have come down 
to us experimentally and historically settled. For most un- 
mistakeably, the claws of the young British lion are here, 
under these old Roman togas; and it became the ' masters ' to 
consider with themselves, for there is, indeed, 'no more fearful 
wild fowl living ' than your lion in such circumstances ; and if 
he should happen to forget his part in any case, and ' roar too 
loud, 5 it would to a dead certainty ' hang them all.' 

But it was only the faint-hearted tailor who proposed to 
' leave out the killing part.' Pyramus sets aside this cowardly 
proposition. He has named the obstacles to be encountered 
only for the sake of magnifying the fertility of his invention 
in overcoming them. He has a device to make all even. 
' Write me a prologue,' he says, e and let the prologue seem to 
say, we will do no harm with our swords-, and for the more 
assurance, tell them that I, Pyramus, am not Pyramus, but 
Bottom, the Weaver', that will put them out of fear.'' And as to 
the lion, there must not only be ' another prologue, to tell that 
he is not a lion,' but ' you must name his name, and half his face 
must be seen through the lion's neck, and he himself must 
speak through, saying thus, or to the same defect. Ladies, or 



312 JULIUS CAESAR. 

fair ladies, my life for yours. If you think I come hither as a 
lion, it were pity of my life.' 

To such devices, in good earnest, were those compelled to 
resort who ventured upon the ticklish experiment of present- 
ing heroic entertainments for king's palaces, where ' hanging 
was the word' in case of a fright; but, with a genius like this 
behind the scenes, so fertile in invention, so various in gifts, 
who could aggravate his voice so effectually, giving you one 
moment the pitch of ' the sucking dove,' or ' roaring you like 
any nightingale,' and the next, f the Hercle's vein,' — with a 
genius who knew how to play, not ' the tyrant's part only,' 
but ' the lover's, which is more condoling,' and whose sugges- 
tion that the audience should look to their eyes in that case, 
was by no means a superfluous one; with a genius who had 
all passions at his command, who could drown, at his pleasure, 
the sharp critic's eye, or blind it with showers of pity, or 
' make it water with the merriest tears, that the passion of loud 
laughter ever shed,' with such resources, prince's edicts could 
be laughed to scorn. It was vain to forbid such an one, to 
meddle with anything that was, or had been, or could be. 

But does any one say — ' To what purpose,' if the end were 
concealed so effectually? And does any one suppose, because 
no faintest suspicion of the true purpose of this play, and of 
all these plays, has from that hour to this, apparently ever 
crossed the English mind, at home or abroad, though no sus- 
picion of the existence of any purpose in them beyond that of 
putting the author in easy circumstances, appears as yet to 
have occurred to any one, — does any one suppose that this 
play, and all these plays, have on that account, failed of their 
purpose; and that they have not been all this time, steadily 
accomplishing it? Who will undertake to estimate, for in- 
stance, the philosophical, educational influence of this single 
Play, on every boy who has spouted extracts from it, from the 
author's time to ours, from the palaces of England, to the log 
school-house in the back-woods of America? 

But suppose now, instead of being the aimless, spontaneous, 
miraculous product of a stupid, ' rude mechanical' bent on 



THE DEATH OF TYRANNY. 313 

producing something which should please the eye, and flatter 
the prejudices of royalty, and perfectly ignorant of the nature 
of that which he had produced ; — suppose that instead of 
appearing as the work of Starveling, and Snout, and Nick 
Bottom, the Weaver, or any person of that grade and 
calibre, that this play had appeared at the time, as the work 
of an English scholar, as most assuredly it was, profoundly 
versed in the history of states in general, as well as in the 
history of the English state in particular, profoundly vei'sed in 
the history of nature in general, as well as in the history of 
human nature in particular. Suppose, for instance, it had 
appeared as the work of an English statesman, already sus- 
pected of liberal opinions, but stedfastly bent for some reason 
or other, on advancement at court, with his eye still intently 
fixed, however secretly, on those insidious changes that were 
then in progress in the state, who knew perfectly well what 
crisis that ship of state was steering for; query, whether some 
of the passages here quoted would have tended to that ' ad- 
vancement' he 'lacked.'' Suppose that instead of Julius Caesar, 
4 looking through the lion's neck/ and gracefully rejecting the 
offered prostrations, it had been the English courtier, con- 
demned to these degrading personal submissions, who ' roared 
you out,' on his own account, after this fashion. Imagine a 
good sturdy English audience returning the sentiment, thun- 
dering their applause at this and other passages here quoted, in 
the presence of a Tudor or a Stuart. 

One might safely conclude, even if the date had not been 
otherwise settled, that anything- so offensive as this never was 
produced in the presence of Queen Elizabeth. King James 
might be flattered into swallowing even such treasonable stuff 
as this; but in her time, the poor lion was compelled to ag- 
gravate his voice after another fashion. Nothing much above 
the sucking-dove pitch, could be ventured on when her quick 
ears were present. He ' roared you' indeed, all through her 
part of the Elizabethan time; but it was like any nightingale. 
The clash and clang of these Eoman Plays were for the less 
sensitive and more learned Stuart. 



314 JULIUS CAESAR. 

MeteUus Cimber. Most high, most mighty, 

And most puissant Caesar; 

Metellus Cimber throws before thy seat 

An humble heart : — [Kneeling ?\ 

Caesar. I must prevent thee, Cimber. 

These couchings and these lowly courtesies 

Might fire the blood of ordinary men ; 

And turn pre-ordinance, and first decree, 

Into the law op children. 

Be not fond 

To think that Caesar bears such rebel blood, 

That will be thawed from the true quality, 

With that which melteth Fools. (?) I mean, sweet words, 

Low, crooked curtsies, and base spaniel fawning . 

Thy brother by decree is banished ; 

If thou dost bend, and pray, and fawn for him, 

1 spurn thee like a cur, out of my way. 

Know Caesar doth not wrong. 

To appreciate this, one must recall not merely the humilia- 
ting personal prostrations which the ceremonial of the English 
Court required then, but that base prostration of truth and 
duty and honour, under the feet of vanity and will and pas- 
sion, which they symbolized. 

Thus far Caesar, but the subject's views on this point, as 
here set forth, are scarcely less explicit, but then it is a Roman 
subject who speaks, and the Roman costume and features, 
look savingly through the lion's neck. 

One of the radical technicalities of that new philosophy of 
the human nature which permeates all this historical exhibi- 
tion, comes in here, however; and it is one which must be 
mastered before any of these plays can be really read. The 
radical point in the new philosophy, as it applies to the human 
nature in particular, is the pivot on which all turns here, — 
here as elsewhere in the writings of this school, — the distinction 
of 'the double self,' the distinction between the particular and 
private nature, with its unenlightened instincts of passion, 
humour, will, caprice, — that self which is changeful, at war 
with itself, self-inconsistent, and, therefore, truly, no self, — 
since the true self is the principle of identity and immutability, 
— the distinction between that ' private' nature when it is 



THE DEATH OF TYRANNY. 315 

developed instinctively as ' selfishness/ and that rational im- 
mutable self which is constitutionally present though latent, 
in all men, and one in them all; that noble special human 
form which embraces and reconciles in its intention, the 
private good with the good of that worthier whole whereof 
we are individually parts and members ; ' this is the distinction 
on which all turns here.' For this philosophy refuses, on 
philosophical grounds, to accept this low, instinctive private 
nature, in any dressing up of accidental power as the god of 
its idolatry, in place of that 'divine or angelical nature, which 
is the perfection of the human form,' and the true sovereignty. 
Obedience to that nature, — ' the approach to, or assumption 
of,' that, makes, in this philosophy, the end of the human 
endeavour, ' and the error and false imitation of that good, 
is that which is the tempest of the human life.' 

But let us hear the passionate Cassius, who is full of indi- 
vidualities himself, and ready to tyrannize with them, but 
somehow, as it would seem, not fond of submitting to the 
' single self in others. 



o 



' Well, honour is the subject of my story. — 
I can not tell what you, and other men, 
Think of this life ; but for my single self, 
I had as lief not be, as live to be 
In awe of such a thing as I myself. 
I was born free as Caesar ; so were you. 
We both have fed as well : and we can both 
Endure the winter's cold as well as he.' — 

And the proof of this personal equality is then given; and 
it is precisely the one which Lear produces, ' When the wind 
made me chatter, there I found them, — there I smelt them 
out.'— 

' For once upon a raw and gusty day, 

The troubled Tiber chafing with her shores, etc. 

sj» ■ M* Sp tff 1 

— Caesar cried, Help me, Cassius, or I sink. 

* * * And this man 

Is now become a god, and Cassius is 
A wretched creature, and must bend his body, 
If Caesar carelessly but nod on him. 



316 JULIUS CAESAR. 

He had a fever when he was in Spain, 
And when the fit was on him — 1 did mark 
How he did shake : 'tis true, this god did shake.' 

[This was a pretty fellow to have about a king's privacy, 
taking notes of this sort on his tablets. Among ' those saws 
and forms and pressm*es past, which youth and observation 
copied there/ all that part reserved for Caesar and his history, 
appears to have escaped the sponge in some way. 

1 They told me I was every thing, 'tis a lie ! I am not ague 
proof.' — Lear. 

His coward lips did from their colour fly. 

' And that same eye whose bend doth awe the world, 

Did lose his lustre.' — Julius Caesar. 

' — When I do stare see how the subject quakes. — ' Lear.] 
I did hear him groan : 

Aye, and that tongue of his that bade the Romans 

Mark him, and write his speeches in their books. 

Alas ! it cried, ' Give me some drink, Titinius,' 

As a sick girl. Ye gods, it doth amaze me, 

A man of such a feeble temper should 

So get the start of the majestic world, 

And bear the palm alone. 
Brutus. Another general shout ! 

I do believe that these applauses are 

For some new honours that are heap'd on Caesar. 
Cassias. Why man, he doth bestride the narrow world, 

Like a Colossus : and we petty men 

Walk under his huge legs; and peep about 

To find ourselves dishonourable graves. 

Men, at some time, are masters of their fates, 

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, 

But in ourselves that we are underlings. 

Brutus and Caesar : What should be in that Caesar ? 
* * * * 

Now in the names of all the gods at once, 
Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed 
That he is grown so great 1 Age, thou art shamed : 
Rome, thou hast lost the breed of noble bloods ! 
When went there by an age, since the great flood, 
But it was famed with more than with One man ? 
When could they say, till now, that talked of Borne, 
That her wide walls encompass'd but One man ? 
Now is it Borne indeed, and room enough, 



THE DEATH OF TYRANNY. 



317 



Casshis. 



Brutus. 
Cassius. 



Brutus. 



When there is in it but one only man. 

[When there is in it (truly) but One only, — Man], 

! you and I have heard our fathers say, 
There was a Brutus once, that would have brook'd 
The eternal devil to keep his state in Rome, 

As easily as a king. 
Brutus. "What you have said, 

1 will consider ; — what you have to say 

I will with patience hear : and find a time 

Both meet to hear, and answer such high things. 

Till then, my noble friend, chew upon this ; — 

Brutus had rather be a villager, 

Than to repute himself a Son of Rome. 

Under these hard conditions, as this time 

Is like to lay upon us. [Chew upon this]. 

I am glad that my weak words 

Have struck but thus much show of fire from Brutus. 

[Re-enter Caesar and his train.] 

The games are done, and Caesar is returning. 

As they pass by, pluck Casca by the sleeve ; 

A nd he will, after his sour fashion, tell you 

"What hath proceeded worthy note to-day. 

I will do so : — But look you, Cassius, 

The angry spot doth glow on Caesar's brow. 

And all the rest look like a chidden train : 

Calphurnia's cheek is pale ; and Cicero 

Looks with such ferret and such fiery eyes, 

As we have seen him in the Capitol, 

Being crossed in conference by some senators. 
Cassius. Casca will tell us what the matter is. 
Caesar. Antonius. 
Antony. Caesar. 
Caesar. Let me have men about me that are fat ; 

Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o' nights : 

Yond' Cassius has a lean and hungry look. 

He thinks too much : such men are dangerous. 
Antony. Fear him not, Caesar ; he 's not dangerous : 

He is a noble Roman, and well given. 
Caesar. "Would he were fatter : — But I fear him not ; 

Yet if my name were liable to fear, 

I do not know the man I should avoid 

So soon as that spare Cassius. He reads much : 

He is a great observer, and he looks 

Quite through the deeds of men : he loves no plays, 

As thou dost Antony ; he hears no music : 

Seldom he smiles ; and smiles in such a sort, 



318 JULIUS CAESAR. 

As if he mocked himself, and scored his spirit 
That coidd be moved to smile at any thing. 
Such men as he are never at heart's ease, 
Whiles they behold a greater than themselves ; 
And therefore are they very dangerous. 
I rather tell thee what is to be feared, 
Than what /fear, for always I am Caesar. 
Come on my right hand, for this ear is deaf, 
And tell me truly what thou think'st of him. 

\Exeunt Caesar and his train. Casca stays behind.] 
Casca. You pulled me by the cloak : would you speak with me ? 
Brutus. Ay, Casca, tell us what hath chanced to-day, 

That Caesar looks so sad. 
Casca. Why you were with him. Were you not 1 
Brutus. 1 should not then ask Casca what hath chanced. 
Casca. Why there was a crown offered him : and, being offered, he 
put it by with the back of his hand, thus ; and then the people fell 
a shouting. 

Brutus. What was the second noise for ? 
Casca. Why for that too. 

Brutus. They shouted thrice. What was the last cry for ? 
Casca. Why for that too ? 
Brutus. Was the crown offered him thrice 1 

Casca. Ay marry was't. And he put it by thrice, every time gentler 
than the other ; and at every putting by, mine honest neighbours 
shouted. 

Cassius. Who offered him the crown ? 
Casca. Why, Antony. 

Brutus. Tell us the manner of it, gentle Casca. 

Casca. I can as well be hanged as tell the manner of it. It was 
mere foolery. I did not mark it. I saw Mark Antony offer him a 
crown ; yet 'twas not a crown ; — neither 'twas one of these coronets ; 
— and, as I told you, he put it by once ; but, for all that, to my think- 
ing, he would fain have had it. Then he offered it to him again ; then 
he put it by again : but, to my thinking, he was very loth to lay his 
fingers off it. And then he offered it the third time ; he put it the 
third time by ; and still, as he refused it, the rabblement hooted, and 
clapped their chapped hands, and threw up their sweaty night caps, and 
uttered such a deal of stinking breath, because Caesar refused the 
crown, that it had almost choked Caesar ; for he swooned and fell down 
at it : and, for mine own part, T durst not laugh, for fear of opening my 
lips and receiving the bad air. 

Cassius. But soft, I pray you : What ? did Caesar swoon ? 
Casca. He fell down in the market-place, and foamed at mouth, and was 
speechless. 

Brutus. 'T is very like ; he hath the falling sickness. 



THE DEATH OF TYRANNY. 319 

Cassius. No, Caesar hath it not ; but you, and I, 

And honest Casca, we have the falling sickness. 

Casca. I know not what you mean by that : but I am sure, Caesar fell 
down. If the" tag-rag people did not clap him and hiss him, according 
as he pleased and displeased them, as they use to do the Players in the 
theatre, I am no true man. 

Brutus. What said he, when he came unto himself. 

Casca. Marry, before he fell down, when he perceived the common 
herd was glad when he refused the crown, he plucked me ope his doublet, 
and offered them his throat to cut. — An I had been a man of any occu- 
pation, if I would not have taken him at a word ; I would I might go to 
hell among the rogues : and so he fell. When he came to himself again, 
he said, if he had done or said anything amiss, he desired their wor- 
ships to think it was his infirmity. Three or four wenches, where I 
stood, cried, 'Alas, good soul ! — and forgave him with all their hearts : 
But there 's no heed to be taken of them ; if Caesar had stabbed their 
mothers, they would have done no less. 

Brutus. And after that, he came thus sad away 1 

Casca. Ay. 

Cassius. Did Cicero say anything ? 

Casca. Ay, he spoke Creek. 

Casshis. To what effect 1 

Casca. Nay, an I tell you that, I '11 ne'er look you $ the face again. But 
those that understood him, smiled at one another, and shook their heads : 
but for mine own part, it was Greek to me. I could tell you more news, 
too : Marullus and Flavius, for pulling scarfs off Caesar's images, are put 
to silence. Fare you well. There was more foolery yet, if I could 
remember it. 

Brutus says of Casca, when he is gone, ' He was quick 
mettle when he went to schooV; and Cassius replies, ' So he is 
now — however he puts on this tardy form. This rudeness is 
a sauce to his good wit, which gives men stomach to digest his 
words with better appetite.' ' And so it is/ Brutus returns ; — 
and so it is, indeed, as any one may perceive, who will take 
the pains to bestow upon these passages the attention which 
the author's own criticism bespeaks for them. 

To the ear of such an one, the roar of the blank verse of 
Cassius is still here, subdued, indeed, but continued, through 
all the humour of this comic prose. 

But it is Brutus who must lend to the Poet the sanction of 
his name and popularity, when he would strike home at last 
to the heart of his subject. Brutus, however, is not yet fully 



320 JULIUS CAESAR. 

won : and, in order to secure him, Cassius will this night throw 

in at his window, ' in several hands - — as if they came from 

several citizens — writings, in which, obscurely, Caesar's 

AMBITION SHALL BE GLANCED AT.' And, 'After this,' he 

says, — 

' Let Caesar seat him sure, 
For we will shake him, or worse days endure.' 

But in the interval, that night of wild tragic splendour 
must come, with its thunder-bolts and showers of fire, and 
unnatural horror. For these elements have a true part to per- 
form here, as in Lear and other plays; they come in, not 
merely as subsidiary to the ' artistic effect' — not merely because 
their wild Titanic play forms an imposing harmonious accom- 
paniment to the play of the human passions and their ' wild- 
ness ' — but as a grand scientific exhibition of the element 
which the Poet is pursuing under all its Protean forms — as a 
most palpable and effective exhibition to the sense of that 
identical thing against which he has raised his eternal standard 
of revolt, refusing to own, under any name, its mastery. 

But one can hear, in that wild lurid night, in the streets of 
Rome, amid the cross blue lightnings, what could not have 
been whispered in the streets of England then, or spoken in 
the ear in closets. 

Cicero. [Encountering Casca in the street, with his sword drawn.] 
Good- even, Casca ; brought you Caesar home? 
Why are you breathless ? and why stare you so ? 
Casca. Are you not moved, when all the sway of earth 
Shakes like a thing unfirm? O Cicero, 
I have seen tempests, when the scolding winds 
Have rived the knotty oaks ; and I have seen 
The ambitious ocean swell, and rage and foam, 
To be exalted with the threatening clouds ; 
But never till to-night, never till now, 
Did I go through a tempest dropping fire. 
Either there is a civil strife in heaven; 
Or else the world, too saucy with the gods, 
Incenses them to send destruction. 

But the night has had other spectacles, it seems, which, to 
his eye, appeared to have some relation to the coming 



THE DEATH OF TYRANNY. 32 1 

struggle; in answer to Cicero's ' Why, saw you anything more 
wonderful ?' Thus he describes them. 

' A common slave, — you know him well by sight, 
Held up his left hand, which did flame and burn 
Like twenty torches join' 'd. 
Against the Capitol I met a lion, 
Who glared upon me, and went surly by' 

[And he had seen, ' drawn on a head/] 

' A hundred ghastly women, 
Transformed with their fears ; who swore they saw 
Men, all in fire, walk up and down the streets. 
And, yesterday, the bird of night did sit, 
Even at noon-day, upon the market-place, 
Hooting, and shrieking.' 

An ominous circumstance, — that last. A portent sure as 
fate. When such things begin to appear, ' men need not go to 
heaven to predict imminent changes/ 

Cicero concedes that ' it is indeed a strange disposed time ?' 
and inserts the statement that ' men may construe things after 
their fashion, clean from the purpose of the things themselves.' 
But this is too disturbed a sky for him to walk in, so exit 
Cicero, and enter one of another kind of mettle, who thinks 
1 the night a very pleasant one to honest men ;' who boasts that 
he has been walking about the streets ' unbraced, baring his 
bosom to the thunder stone,' and playing with ' the cross blue 
lightning;' and when Casca reproves him for this temerity, he 
replies, 

' You are dull, Casca, and those sparks of life 
That should be in a Roman, you do want, 
Or else you use not.' 

For as to these extraordinary phenomena in nature, he says, 
' If you would consider the true cause 

Why all these things change, from their ordinance, 
Their natures and fore formed faculties, 
To monstrous quality ; why, you shall find, 
That heaven hath infused them with these spirits, 
To make them instruments of fear, and warning, 
Unto some monstrous state.' 
Y 



322 



JULIUS CAESAR. 



Cascu. 
Cassius 



Casca. 



Now could I, Casca, 
Name to thee a man most like this dreadful night ; 
That thunders, lightens, opens graves, and roars 
As doth the lion in the Capitol : 
A man no mightier than thyself, or me, 
In psrsonal action ; yet prodigious grown, 
And fearful, as these strange eruptions are. 
Tis Caesar that you mean : Is it not, Cassius ? 
Let it be who it is : for Romans now 
Have theuies and limbs like to their ancestors ; 
Bat, woe the while ! our fathers' minds are dead, 
And we are govern' d with our mothers 1 spirits ; 
Our yoke and sufferance shows us womanish. 
Indeed, they say, the senators to-morrow 
Mean to establish Caesar as a king. 
And he shall wear his crown by sea, and land, 
In every place, save here in Italy. 

Cassius. I know where I will wear this dagger then; 
Cassius from bondage will deliver Cassius : 
Therein, ye gods, you make the weak most strong ; 
Therein, ye gods, you tyrants do defeat : 
Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass, 
Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron, 
Can be retentive to the strength of spirit. 
If I know this, know all the world besides, 
That part of tyranny, that I do bear, 
i" can shake off at pleasure. 

So can I : 

So every bondman in his own hand bears 
The power to cancel his captivity. 

Cassius. And why should Caesar be a tyrant then ? 
Poor man ! I know, he would not be a wolf, 
But that he sees the Romans are but sheep > 
He were no lion, were not Romans hinds. 
Those that with haste will make a mighty fire, 
Begin it with weak straws : What trash is Rome, 
What rubbish, and what offal, when it serves 
For the base matter to illuminate 
So vile a thing as Caesar ? But, grief ! 
Where hast thou led me ? /, perhaps, speak this 
Before a willing bondman ; then I know 
My answer must be made : But I am arm'd 
And dangers are to me indifferent. 
You speak to Casca ; and to such a man, 
That is no fleering tell-tale. Hold my hand : 
Be factious for redress of all these griefs : 



Casca. 



Casca. 



THE DEATH OF TYRANNY. 323 

And I will set this foot of mine as far, 
As ivho goes farthest. 
Cassius. There's a bargain made. 

This is sufficiently explicit, an unprejudiced listener would 
be inclined to say — indeed, it is difficult to conceive how any 
more positively instructive exhibition of the subject, could 
well have been made. Certainly no one can deny that this 
fact of the personal helplessness, the physical weakness of those 
in whom this arbitrary power over the liberties and lives of 
others is vested, seems for some reason or other to have taken 
strong possession of the Poet's imagination. For how else, 
otherwise should he reproduce it so often, so elaborately under 
such a variety of forms? — with such a stedfastness and perti- 
nacity of purpose? 

The fact that the power which makes these personalities so 
' prodigious/ so ' monstrous,' overshadowing the world, ' sham- 
ing the Age with their ' colossal' individualities, no matter what 
new light, what new gifts of healing for its ills, that age has 
been endowed with, levelling all to their will, contracting all to 
the limit of their stinted nature, making of all its glories but 
' rubbish, oflfal to illuminate their vileness,' — the fact that 
the power which enables creatures like these, to convulse na- 
tions with their whims, and deluge them with blood, at their 
pleasure, — which puts the lives and liberties of the noblest, 
always most obnoxious to them, under their heel — the fact that 
this power resides after all, not in these persons themselves, — 
that they are utterly helpless, pitiful, contemptible, in them- 
selves ; but that it exists in the ' thewes and limbs' of those 
who are content to be absorbed in their personality, who are 
content to make muscles for them, in those who are content to 
be mere machines for the ' only one man's' will and passion 
to operate with, — the fact that this so fearful power lies all in 
the consent of those who suffer from it, is the fact which this 
Poet wishes to be permitted to communicate, and which he 
will communicate in one form or another, to those whom it 
concerns to know it. 

It is a fact, which he is not content merely to state, how- 

y2 



324 JULIUS CAESAR. 

ever, in so many words, and so have done with it. He will 
impress it on the imagination with all kinds of vivid represen- 
tation. He will exhaust the splendours of his Art in uttering 
it. He will leave a statement on this subject, profoundly philo- 
sophical, but one that all the world will be able to compre- 
hend eventually, one that the world will never be able to 
unlearn. 

The single individual helplessness of the man whom the 
multitude, in this case, were ready to arm with unlimited 
power over their own welfare — that physical weakness, already 
so strenuously insisted on by Cassius, at last attains its climax 
in the representation, when, in the midst of his haughtiest 
display of will and personal authority, stricken by the hands 
of the men he scorned, by the hand of one ' he had just 
spurned like a cur out of his path,' he falls at the foot of 
Pompey's statue — or, rather, ' when at the base of Pompey's 
statua he lies along' — amid all the noise, and tumult, and 
rushing action of the scene that follows — through all its pro- 
tracted arrangements, its speeches, and ceremonials — not un- 
marked, indeed, — the centre of all eyes, — but, mute, motionless, 
a thing of pity, ' A piece of bleeding earth.' 

That helpless cry in the Tiber, ' Save me, Cassius, or I 
sink !'— that feeble cry from the sick man's bed in Spain, 
' Give me some drink, Titinius!' — and all that pitiful display 
of weakness, moral and physical, at the would-be coronation, 
which Casca's report conveys so unsparingly — the falling down 
in the street speechless, which Cassius emphasises with his 
scornful 'What? did Caesar swoon?' — all this makes but 
a part of the exhibition, which the lamentations of Mark 
Antony complete : — 

' mighty Caesar, dost thou lie so low ? 
Are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils, 
Shrunk to this little measure f 

This ? and ' the eye' of the spectator, more learned than 
' his ear/ follows the speaker's eye, and measures it. 

' Fare thee well. 
But yesterday the word of Caesar might 



. > 



THE DEATH OF TYRANNY. 325 

Have stood against the world : now lies he there. 
And none so poor, to do him reverence? 

The Poet's tone breaks through Mark Antony's ; the Poet's 
finger points, * now lies he there' — there ! 

That form which 'lies there,' with its mute eloquence 
speaking this Poet's word, is what he calls ' a Transient 
Hieroglyphic,' which makes, he says, ' a deeper impression on 
minds of a certain order, than the language of arbitrary signs ;' 
and his ' delivery' on the most important questions will be 
found, upon examination, to derive its principal emphasis 
from a running text in this hand. c For, in such business,' he 
says, ' action is eloquence, and the eyes of the ignorant more 
learned than the ears.' 

Or, as he puts it in another place : ' What is sensible always 
strikes the memory more strongly, and sooner impresses itself, 
than what is intellectual. Thus the memory of brutes is ex- 
cited by sensible, but not by intellectual things. And there- 
fore it is easier to retain the image of a sportsman hunting, than 
of the corresponding notion of invention — of an apothecary 
ranging his boxes, than of the corresponding notion of dispo- 
sition — of an orator making a speech, than of the term 
Eloquence — or a boy repeating verses, than the term Memory 
— or of A player acting his part, than the corresponding 
notion of — ACTION.' 

So, also, £ Tom 0' Bedlam' 1 was a better word for ' houseless 
misery,' than all the king's prayer, good as it was, about 
' houseless heads, and unfed sides,' in general, and c looped, 
and windowed raggedness.' 

' We construct,' says this author, in another place — reject- 
ing the ordinary history as not suitable for scientific purposes, 
because it is ' varied, and diffusive, and confounds and disturbs 
the understanding, unless it be fixed and exhibited in due 
order' — we construct ' tables and combinations of instances, 
upon such a plan and in such order, that the understanding 
may be enabled to act upon them.' 



326 JULIUS CAESAR. 



CHAPTER II. 



caesar's spirit. 



I'll meet thee at Phillippi. 

TN Julius Caesar, the most splendid and magnanimous repre- 
sentative of arbitrary power is selected — ' the foremost man 
of all the world,' — even by the concession of those who condemn 
him to death; so that here it is the mere abstract question as 
to the expediency and propriety of permitting any one man to 
impose his individual will on the nation. Whatever person- 
alities are involved in the question here — with Brutus, at 
least — tend to bias the decision in his favour. For so he 
tells us, as with agitated step he walks his orchard on that 
wild night which succeeds his conference with Cassius, revolv- 
ing his part, and reading, by the light of the exhalations 
whizzing in the air, the papers that have been found thrown 
in at his study window. 

' It must be by hia death : and, for my part, 
I know no personal cause to spurn at him, 
But for the general. He would be crown'd : — 
How that might change his nature, there 's the question. 
It is the bright day that brings forth the adder ; 
And that craves wary walking. Crown him ? That ; — 
And then, I grant, we put a sting in him, 
That at his will he may do danger with. 
The abuse of greatness is, when it disjoins 
Remorse from power : And, to speak truth of Caesar, 
I have not known when his affections sway'd 
More than his reason. But 't is a common proof, 
That lowliness is young ambition's ladder, 
Whereto the climber upward turns his face : 
But when he once attains the utmost round, 
He then unto the ladder turns his back, 
Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees 
By which he did ascend : So Caesar may ; 
Then, lest he may, prevent. And, since the quarrel, 
Will bear no colour for the thing he is, 



caesar's spirit. 327 

Fashion it thus ; that what he is, augmented, 

Would run to these, and these extremities : 

And therefore think him as a serpent's egg, 

Which, hatch' d, would, as his kind, grow mischievous ; 

And kill him in the shell.' 

Pretty sentiments these, to set before a king already engaged 
in so critical a contest with his subjects; pleasant entertain- 
ment, one would say, for the representative of a monarchy 
that had contrived to wake the sleeping Brutus in its do- 
minions, — that was preparing, even then, for its own death- 
struggle on this very question, which this Brutus searches to 
its core so untenderly. 

1 Have you heard the argument?' says the ' bloat king' in 
Hamlet. ' Is there no offence in it ?' 

Now, let the reader suppose, for one instant, that this work 
had been produced from the outset openly, for what any reader 
of common sense will perceive it to be, with all its fire, an 
elaborate, scholarly composition, the product of the profoundest 
philosophic invention, the fruit of the ripest scholarship of the 
age; — let him suppose, for argument's sake, that it had been 
produced for what it is, the work of a scholar, and a states- 
man, and a courtier, — a statesman already jealously watched, 
or already, perhaps, in deadly collision with this very power 
he is denning here so largely, and tracking to its ultimate 
scientific comprehensions; — and then let the reader imagine, 
if he can, Elizabeth or James, but especially Elizabeth, listen- 
ing entranced to such passages as the one last quoted, with an 
audience disposed to make points of some of the ' choice 
Italian ' lines in it. 

Does not all the world know that scholars, men of reverence, 
men of world-wide renown, men of every accomplishment, 
were tortured, and mutilated, and hung, and beheaded, in both 
these two reigns, for writings wherein Caesar's ambition was 
infinitely more obscurely hinted at — writings unspeakably 
less offensive to majesty than this? 

But, then, a Play was a Play, and old Romans would be 
Eomans; there was, notoriously, no royal way of managing 
them; and if kings would have tragical mirth out of them, 



328 JULIUS CAESAR. 

they must take their treason in good part, and make them- 
selves as merry with it as they could. The poor Poet was, of 
course, no more responsible for these men than Chaucer was 
for his pilgrims. He but reported them. 

And besides, in that broad, many-sided view of the subject 
which the author's evolution of it from the root involves, — 
in that pursuit of tyranny in essence through all its disguises, 

— other exhibitions of it were involved, which might seem, to 
the careless eye, purposely designed to counteract the effect of 
the views above quoted. 

The fact that mere arbitrary will, that the individual humour 
and bias, is incapable of furnishing a rule of action anywhere, 

— the fact that mere will, or blind passion, whether in the 
One, or the Few, or the Many, should have no part, above all, 
in the business of the state, — should lend no colour or bias to 
its administration, — the fact that ' the general good,' ' the 
common weal,' which is justice, and reason, and humanity, 

— the ' ONE ONLY man/ — should, in some way, under some 
form or other, get to the head of that and rule, this is all which 
the Poet will contend for. 

But, alas, how? The unspeakable difficulties in the way 
of the solution of this problem , — the difficulties which the 
radical bias in the individual human nature, even under its 
noblest forms, creates, — the difficulties which the ignorance, 
and stupidity, and passion of the multitude created then, and 
still create, appear here without any mitigation. They are 
studiously brought out in their boldest colours. There's no 
attempt to shade them down. They make, indeed, the 
TRAGEDY. 

And it is this general impartial treatment of his subjects 
which makes this author's writings, with all their boldness, 
generally, so safe; for it seems to leave him without any bias 
for any person or any party — without any opinion on any 
topic; for his truth embraces and resolves all partial views, 
and is as broad as nature's own. 

And how could he better neutralise the effect of these 
patriotic speeches, and prove his loyalty in the face of them, 
than to show as he does, most vigorously and effectively, that 



caesar's spirit. 329 

these patriots themselves, so rebellious to tyranny, so opposed 
to the one-man power in others, so determined to die, rather 
than submit to the imposition of the humours of any man, 
instead of law and justice, — were themselves but men, and 
were as full of will and humours, and as ready to tyrannise 
with them, too, upon occasion, as Caesar himself; and were no 
more fit to be trusted with absolute power than he was, nor, 
in fact, half so fit. 

Caesar does, indeed, send word to the senate — * The cause 
is in MY will, / will not come; {That is enough, he says, to 
satisfy the senate. 1 ) And while the conspirators are exchanging 
glances, and the daggers are stealing from their sheaths, he 
offers the strength of his decree, the immutability ( of his abso- 
lute shall,' to the suppliant for his brother's pardon. 

But then Portia gives us to understand, that she, too, has 
her private troubles; — that even that excellent man, Brutus, 
is not without his moods in his domestic administrations, — for 
on one occasion, when he treats her to ' ungentle looks,' and 
' stamps his foot,' and angrily gesticulates her out of his pre- 
sence, she makes good her retreat, thinking ' it was but the 
effect of humour, which,' she says, ' sometime hath his hour 
with every man ' ; and, good and patriotic as Brutus truly is, 
Cassius perceives, upon experiment, that after all he too is but 
a man, and, with a particular and private nature, as well as a 
larger one ' which is the worthier/ and not unassailable through 
that ' single I myself : he, too, may be ' thawed from the true 
quality with that which melteth fools,' — with words that 
flatter ' his particular.' In his conference with him, Cassius ad- 
dresses himself skilfully to this weakness ; — he poises the name 
of Caesar with that of Brutus, and, at the last, he clinches his 
patriotic appeal, with an appeal to his personal sentiment, of 
baffled, mortified emulation; for those writings, thrown in at 
his window, purporting to come from several citizens, ' all 
tended to the great opinion that Home held of his name;' and, 
alas ! the Poet will not tell us that this did not unconsciously 
make, in that pure mind, the feather's- weight that was per- 
haps needed to turn the scale. 



330 JULIUS CAESAR. 

And the very children know, by heart, what a time there 
was between these two men afterwards, these men that had 
' struck the foremost man of all the world/ and had congra- 
tulated themselves that it was not murder, and that they were 
not villains, because it was for justice. Precious disclosures 
we have in this scene. It is this very Cassius, this patriot, 
who had as lief not be as submit to injustice; who brings his 
avaricious humour, ' his itching palm,' into the state, and ( sells 
and marts his offices for gold, to undeservers/ Brutus does 
indeed come down upon him with a most unlimited burst of 
patriotic indignation, which looks, at first, like a mere frenzy 
of honest disgust at wrong in the abstract, in spite of the 
partiality of friendship; but, when Cassius charges him, after- 
wards, with exaggerating his friend's infirmities, he says, 
frankly, ' I did not, till you practised them on me.' And we find, 
as the dialogue proceeds, that it is indeed a personal matter with 
him : Cassius has refused him gold to pay his legions with. 

And see, now, what kind of taunt it is, that Brutus throws 
in this same patriot's face after it had been proclaimed, by his 
order, through the streets of Rome, that Tyranny 'is dead': 
after Cassius had shouted through his own lungs. 

'Some to the common pulpits, and cry out Liberty, Freedom, En- 
franchisement.' (Enfranchisement ?) 

It would have been strange, indeed, if in so general and 
philosophical a view of the question, that sacred, domestic insti- 
tution, which, through all this sublime frenzy for equal rights, 
maintained itself so peacefully under the patriot's roof, had 
escaped without a touch. 
Brutus says: — 

' Hear me, for I will speak. 
Must I give way and room to your rash choler ? 
Shall I be frighted when a madman stares P 

' Look when I stare, see how the subject quakes.' 

This sounds, already, as if Tyranny were not quite dead. 

1 Cassius. ye gods, ye gods, must I endure all this ? 
Brutus. All tbis ? ay more : Fret till your proud heart break ; 
Go, show your slaves how choleric you are, 



caesar's spirit. 331 

And bid touk bondmen tremble. Must I budge 1 
Must / observe you 1 Must / stand and crouch 
Under your testy humour / By the gods, 
You shall digest the venom of your spleen 
Though it do split you.' 

So it was a mistake, then, it seems; and, notwithstanding 
that shout of triumph, and that bloody flourishing of knives, 
Tyranny was not dead. 

But one cannot help thinking that that shout must have 
sounded rather strangely in an English theatre just then, and 
that it was a somewhat delicate experiment to give Brutus his 
pulpit on the stage, to harangue the people from. But the 
author knew what he was doing. That cold, stilted harangue, 
that logical chopping on the side of freedom, was not going to 
set fire to any one's blood; and was not there Mark Antony 
that plain, blunt man, coming directly after Brutus, — ' with his 
eyes as red as fire with weeping,' with 'the mantle,' of the 
military hero, the popular favourite, in his hand, with his 
glowing oratory, with his sweet words, and his skilful appeal 
to the passions of the people, under his plain, blunt profes- 
sions, — to wipe out every trace of Brutus's reasons, and lead 
them whither he would; and would not the moral of it all be, 
that with such A people, — with such a power as that, behind 
the state, there was no use in killing Caesars — that Tyranny 
could not die. 

' I fear there will a worse one come in his place.' 

But this is Rome in her decline, that the artist touches here 
so boldly. But what now, if old Rome herself, — plebeian 
Rome, in the deadliest onset of her struggle against tyranny, 
Rome lashed into fury and conscious strength, rising from 
under the hard heel of her oppressors; what if Rome, in the 
act of creating her Tribunes; or, if Rome, with her Tribunes 
at her head, wresting from her oppressors a constitutional 
establishment of popular rights, — what if this could be exhi- 
bited, by permission; what bounds as to the freedom of the 
discussion would it be possible to establish afterwards? There 



332 THE DEATH OF TYRANNY. 

had been no National Latin Tragedy, Frederic Schlegel sug- 
gests, — because no Latin Dramatist could venture to do this 
very thing; but of course Caesar or Coriolanus on the Tiber 
was one thing, and Caesar or Coriolanus on the Thames was 
another; and an English author might be allowed, then, to 
say of* the one, with impunity, what it would certainly have cost 
him his good right hand, or his ears,, or his head, to say of the 
other, — what it did cost the Founder of this school in philo- 
sophy his head, to be suspected of saying of the other. 

Nevertheless, the great question between an arbitrary and a 
constitutional government, the principle of a government which 
vests the whole power of the state in the uncontrolled will of a 
single individual member of it; the whole history and philoso- 
phy of a military government, from its origin in the heroic 
ages, — from the crowning of the military hero on the battle 
field in the moment of victory, to the final consummation of 
its conquest of the liberty of the subject, could be as clearly 
set forth under the one form as the other; not without some 
startling specialities in the filling up, too, with a tone in the 
details now and then, to say the least, not exclusively antique, 
for this was a mode of treating classical subjects in that 
age, too common to attract attention. 

And thus, whole plays could be written out and out, on this 
very subject. Take, for instance, but these two, Coriolanus and 
Julius Caesar, — plays in which, by a skilful distribution of the 
argument and the action, with a skilful interchange of parts 
now and then, — the boldest passages being put alternately 
into the mouths of the Tribunes and Patricians, — that great 
question, which was so soon to become the outspoken question 
of the nation and the age, could already be discussed in all its 
vexed and complicated relations, in all its aspects and bearings, 
as deliberately as it could be to-day ; exactly as it was, in fact, 
discussed not long afterwards in swarms of English pamphlets, 
in harangues from English pulpits, in English parliaments and 
on English battle-fields, — exactly as it was discussed when 
that ' lofty Roman scene ' came ' to be acted over' here, with 
the cold-blooded prosaic formalities of an English judicature. 



CORIOLANUS. 

THE QUESTION OF THE CONSULSHIP; 

OE, 

THE SCIENTIFIC CURE OP THE COMMON-WEAL 
PROPOUNDED. 

' Well, march we on 
To give obedience where 'tis truly owed: 
Meet we the medicine of the sickly weal, 
And with him, pour we in our country's purge 
Each drop of us. 

Or so much as it needs 
To dew the sovereign Flower, and drown the weeds.' — Macbeth. 

1 Have you heard the argument?' 

CHAPTER I. 

THE ELIZABETHAN HEROISM. 

' Mildly is the word.' 

' In a better hour, 
Let what is meet be said it must be meet, 
And throw their power in the dust.' 

TT is the Military Chieftain of ancient Rome who pronounces 
■*■ here the words in which the argument of the Elizabethan 
revolutionist is so tersely comprehended. 

It is the representative of an heroic aristocracy, not one of an- 
cient privilege merely, not one armed with parchments only, claim- 
ing descent from heroes ; but the yet living leaders of the rabble 
people to military conquest, and the only leaders who are 
understood to be able to marshal from their ranks an effective 
force for military defence. 

But this is not all. The scope of the poetic design requires 
here, under the sheath which this dramatic exhibition of an 
ancient aristocracy offers it, the impersonation of another and 
more sovereign difference in men ; and this poet has ends to 
serve, to which a mere historical accuracy in the reproduction 



334 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

of this ancient struggle of state-factions, in an extinct Euro- 
pean common -wealth, is of little consequence; though he is 
not wanting in that either, or indifferent to it, when occasion 
serves. 

From the speeches inserted here and there, we find that this is 
at the same time an aristocracy of learning which is put upon 
the stage here, that it is an aristocracy of statesmanship and 
civil ability, that it is composed of the select men of the state, 
and not its elect only; that it is the true and natural head of 
the healthful body politic, and not ' the horn of the monster* 
only. This is the aristocracy which appears to be in session in 
the back ground of this piece at least, and we are not without 
some occasional glimpses of their proceedings, and this is the 
element of the poetic combination which comes out in the dia- 
logue, whenever the necessary question of the play requires it. 

For it is the collision between the civil interests and the in- 
terests which the unlearned heroic ages enthrone, that is 
coming off here. It is the collision between the government 
which uneducated masses of men create and confirm, and re- 
create in any age, and the government which the enlightened 
man ' in a better hour ' demands, which the common sense 
and sentiment of man, as distinguished from the brute, de- 
mands, whether in the one, or the few, or the many. — This is 
the struggle which is getting into form and order here, — here 
first. These are the parties to it, and in the reign of the last 
of the Tudors and the first of the Stuarts, they must be con- 
tent to fight it out on any stage which their time can afford to 
lease to them for that performance, without being over scrupu- 
lous as to the names of the actors, or the historical correctness 
of the costumes, and other particulars; not minding a little 
shuffling in the parts, now and then, if it suits their 
poet's convenience, who has no conscience at all on such points, 
and who is of the opinion that this is the very stage which an 
action of such gravity ought to be exhibited on, in the first place ; 
and that a very careful and critical rehearsal of it here, ought 
to precede the performance elsewhere; though a contrary opinion 
was not then without its advocates. 



THE ELIZABETHAN HEROISM. 335 

It is as the mouth-piece of this intellectual faction in the 
state, while it is as yet an aristocracy, contending with the 
physical force of it, struggling for the mastery of it with its 
numerical majority; it is the Man in the state, the new MAN 
struggling with the chief which a popular ignorance has 
endowed with dominion over him ; it is the hero who contends 
for the majesty of reason and the kingdom of the mind, it is 
the new speaker, the new, and now at last, commanding 
speaker for that law, Avhich was old when this myth was 
named, which was not of yesterday when Antigone quoted 
it, who speaks now from this Roman's lips, the3e words of 
doom, — the reflection on the ' times deceased,' the prophecy of 
' things not yet come to life,' the word of new ages. 

' In A REBELLION, 

When what's not meet, but what must be, was law, 
Then were they chosen : in a better hour 
Let what is meet be said it must be meet, 
And throw their power in the dust.' 

Not in the old, sombre, Etruscan streets of ancient Eome, 
not where the Roman market-place joined the Capitoline hill 
and began to ascend it, crossed the road from Palatinus thither, 
and began to obstruct it, not in the courts and colonnades of 
the primeval hill of palaces, were the terms of this proposal 
found. And not from the old logician's chair, was the sweep 
of their comprehension made; not in any ancient school of 
rhetoric or logic were they cast and locked in that conjunc- 
tion. It was another kind of weapon that the old Roman Jove 
had to take in hand, when amid the din of the Roman forum, 
he awoke at last from his bronze and marble, to his empirical 
struggle, his unlearned, experimental struggle with the wolf 
and her nursling, with his own baptized, red-robed, usurping 
Mars. It was not with any such subtlety as this, that the 
struggle of state forces which, under one name or another, 
sooner or later, in the European states is sure to come, had. 
hitherto been conducted. 

And not from the lips of the haughty patrician chief, rising 



336 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

from the dust of ages at the spell of genius, to encounter his 
old plebeian vanquishers, and fight his long-lost battles o'er 
again, at a showman's bidding, for a showman's greed — to be 
stung anew into patrician scorn — to repeat those rattling 
volleys of the old martial Latin wrath, ' in states unborn ' and 
1 accents then unknown,' for an hour's idle entertainment, for 
( a six-pen'orth or shilling's worth ' of gaping amusement to a 
playhouse throng, not — NOT from any such source came that 
utterance. 

It came from the council-table of a sovereignty that was 
plotting here in secret then the empire that the sun shall not 
set on ; whose beginning only, we have seen. It came from 
the secret chamber of a new union and society of men, — a 
union based on a new and, for the first time, scientific ac- 
quaintance with the nature that is in men, with the sovereignty 
that is in all men. It was the Poet of this society who put 
those words together — the Poet who has heard all its pros and 
cons, who reports them all, and gives to them all their exact 
weight in the new balance of his decisions. 

Among other things, it was understood in this association, 
that the power, which was at that time supreme in England, 
was in fact, though not in name, a. popular power, — a power, at 
least, sustained only by the popular will, though men had not, 
indeed, as yet, begun to perceive that momentous circum- 
stance, — a power which, being ' but the horn and noise o' the 
monster,' was able to oppose its ' absolute shall ' to the em- 
bodied wisdom of the state, — not to its ancient immemorial 
government only, but to ' its chartered liberties in the body of 
the weal,' and ' to a graver bench than ever frowned in 
Greece'; and the Poet has put on his record of debates on 
those ' questions of gravity,' that were agitating then this 
secret Chamber of Peers, a distinct demand on the part of 
this ancient leadership, — the leadership of ' the honoured 
number,' the honourable and right honourable few, that this 
mass of ignorance, and stupidity, and blind custom, and inca- 
pacity for rule, — this combination of mere instinctive force, 
which the physical majority in unlearned times constitutes, 



ELIZABETHAN HEROISM. 337 

which supplies, in its want, and ignorance, and passivity, and 
in its passionate admiration of heroism and love of leadership, 
the ready material of tyranny, shall be annihilated, and cease 
to have any leadership or voice in the state ; and this demand 
is" put by the Poet into the mouth of one who cannot see from 
his point of observation — with his ineffable contempt for the 
people — what the Poet sees from his, that the demand, as he 
puts it, is simply ' the impossible.' For this is a question in 
the mixed mathematics, and ' the greater part carries it.' 

That instinctive, unintelligent force in the state — that 
blind volcanic force — which foolish states dare to keep pent 
up within them, is that which the philosopher's eye is intent 
on also; he, too, has marked this as the primary source of 
mischief, — he, too, is at war with it, — he, too, would anni- 
hilate it ; but he has his own mode of warfare for it ; he thinks 
it must be done with Apollo's own darts, if it be done when 
'tis done, and not with the military chieftain's weapon. 

This work is one in which the question of heroism and 
nobility is scientifically treated, and in the most rigid manner, 
' by line and level,' and through that representative form in 
which the historical pretence of it is tried, — through that scien- 
tific negation, with its merely instinctive, vulgar, unlearned am- 
bition — with its monstrous ' outstretching ' on the one hand, 
and its dwarfish limitations on the other, — through all that 
finely drawn, historic picture of that which claims the human 
subjection, the clear scientific lines of the true ideal type are 
visible, — the outline of the true nobility and government is 
visible, — towering above that detected insufficiency, into the 
perfection of the human form, — into the heaven of the true 
divineness, — into the chair of the perpetual dictatorship, — 
into the consulship whose year revolves not, whose year is the 
state. 

Neither is this true affirmation here in the form of a scien- 
tific abstraction merely. It is not here in the general merely. 
' The Instance,' the particular impersonation of nobility and 
heroism, which this play exhibits, is, indeed, the false heroism 
and nobility. It is the hitherto uncriticised, and, therefore, 

z 



338 THE CURE OF THE COMMON WEAL. 

uncorrected, popular affirmation on this subject which is em- 
bodied here, and this turns out to be, as usual, the clearest 
scientific negative that could be invented. But in the design, 
and in all the labour of this piece, — in the steadfast purpose 
that is always working out that definition, with its so exquisite, 
but thankless, unowned, unrecognised toil, graving it and 
pointing it with its pen of diamond in the rock for ever, ap- 
proving itself 'to the Workm aster ' only, — in this incessant 
design, — in this veiled, mysterious authorship, — an historical 
approximation to the true type of magnanimity and heroism is 
always present. But there is more in it than this. 

It is the old popular notion of heroism which fills the fore- 
ground ; but the Elizabethan heroism is always lurking behind 
it, watching its moment, ready to seize it; and under that 
cover, it contrives to advance and pronounce many words, 
which, in its own name and form, it could not then have been 
so prosperously delivered of. Under the disguise of that his- 
torical impersonation — under the mask of that old Roman 
hero, other, quite other, heroic forms — historic forms — not 
less illustrious, not less memorable, from time to time steal in; 
and ere we know it, the suppressed Elizabethan men are on 
the stage, and the Theatre is, indeed, the Globe; and it is 
shaking and flashing with the iron heel and the thunder of 
their leadership ; and the thrones of oppression are downfalling ; 
and the ages that seemed ' far off,' the ages that were nigh, are 
there — are there as they are here. 

The historical position of the men who could entertain the 
views which this Play embodies, in the age in which it was 
written — the whole position of the men in whom this idea of 
nobility and government was already struggling to become 
historical — flashes out from that obscure back-ground into 
the most vivid historical representation, when once the light — 
' the great light' which ' the times give to true interpretations' 
— has been brought to bear upon it. And it does so happen, 
that that is the light which we are particularly directed to 
hold up to this particular play, and, what is more, to this par- 
ticular point in it. • So our virtues, 1 says the old Volscian 



ELIZABETHAN HEROISM. 339 

captain, Tullus Aufidius, lamenting the limitations of his 
historical position, and apologizing for the figure he makes in 
history — 

' So our virtues 
Lie in the interpretation of the times.' 

[' The times, in many cases, give great light to true inter- 
pretations,' says the other, speaking of books, and the method of 
reading them ; but this one applies that suggestion particularly 
to lives.~\ 

'And power, unto itself most commendable, 
Hath not a tomb so evident as a hair 
To extol what it hath done.' 

The spirit of the Elizabethan heroism is indeed here, and 
imder the cover of this old Roman story; and under cover of 
those so marked differences in the positions which suffice to 
detain the unstudious eye, through the medium of that which 
is common under those differences, the history of the Eliza- 
bethan heroism is here also. The spirit of it is here, not in 
that subtler nature only — that yet, perhaps, subtler, calmer, 
stronger nature, in which ' blood and judgment were so well 
co-mingled' — so well, in such new degree and proportion, that 
their balance made a new force, a new generative force, in 
history — not in that one only, the one in whom this new 
historic form is visible and palpable already, but in the haugh- 
tier and more unbending historic attitude, at least, of his great 
' co-mate and brother in exile/ It is here in the form of the 
great military chieftain of that new heroic line, who found 
himself, with all his strategy, involved in a single-handed con- 
test with the state and its whole physical strength, in his 
contest with that personal power in whose single arm, in 
whose miserable finger-joints, the state and all its force then 
lay. Under that old, threadbare, martial cloak, — under the 
safe disguise of martial tyranny in 'the few/ — whenever the 
business of the play requires it, whenever c his cue comes,' he 
is there. Under that old, rusty Roman helmet, his smothered 
speech, his ' speech of fire,' his passionate speech, ' forbid so 
long,' drops thick and fast, drops unquenched at last, and 

z 2 



340 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

glows for ever. It is the headless Banquo — ' the blood- 
boltered Banquo' — that stalks through that shadowy back- 
ground all unharmed; his Fleance lives, and in him ' Nature's 
copy is eterne.' 

His house of kings, with gold-bound brows, and sceptres in 
their hands, with two-fold balls and sceptres in their hands — 
are here filling the stage, and claiming it to the crack of 
doom ; and now he ' smiles/ he smiles upon his baffled foe, 
' and points at them for His/ 

The whole difficulty of this great Elizabethan position, and 
the moral of it, is most carefully and elaborately exhibited 
here. No plea at the bar was ever more finely and eloquently 
laboured. It was for the bar of ' foreign nations and future 
ages' that this defence was prepared : the speaker who speaks 
so ' pressly,' is the lawyer; and there is nothing left unsaid at 
last. But it is not exhibited in words merely. It is acted. 
It is brought out dramatically. It is presented to the eye as 
well as to the ear. The impossibility of any other mode of 
proceeding under those conditions is not demonstrated in this 
instance by a diagram, drawn on a piece of paper, and handed 
about among the jury; it is not an exact drawing of the street, 
and the house, and the corner where the difficulty occurred, 
with the number of yards and feet put down in ink or pencil 
marks; it is something much more lively and tangible than 
that which we have here, under pardon of this old Roman 
myth. 

For the story, as to this element of it, is indeed not new. 
The story of the struggle of the few with the many, of the one 
with the many, of the one with ' the many-headed,' is indeed 
an old one. Back into the days of demi-gods and gods it takes 
us. It is the story of the celestial Titan, with his benefactions 
for men, and force and strength, with art to aid them — reluct- 
ant art — compelled to serve their ends, enringing his limbs, 
and driving hard the stakes. Here, indeed, in the Fable, in 
the proper hero of it, it is the struggle of the ' partliness' of 
pride and selfish ambition, lifting itself up in the place of God, 
and arraying itself against the common-tveal, as well as the 



ELIZABETHAN HEROISM. 34 1 

common-will; but the physical relation of the one to the 
many, the position of the individual who differs from his time 
on radical questions, the relative strength of the parties to this 
war, and the weapons and the mode of warfare inevitably pre- 
scribed to the minority under such conditions — all this is 
carefully brought out from the speciality of this instance, and 
presented in its most general form ; and the application of the 
result to the position of the man who contends for the com- 
mon-weal, against the selfish will, and passion, and narrowness, 
and short-sightedness of the multitude, is distinctly made. 

Yes, the Elizabethan part is here; that all-unappreciated 
and odious part, which the great men of the Elizabethan time 
found forced upon them; that most odious part of all, which 
the greatest of his time found force'd upon him as the condition 
of his greatness. It is here already, negatively defined, in this 
passionate defiance, which rings out at last in the Roman 
street, when the hero's pride bursts through his resolve, when 
he breaks down at last in his studied part, and all considera- 
tions of policy, all regard to that which was dearer to him 
than ' his single mould? is given to the winds in the tempest of 
his wrath, and he stands at bay, and confronts alone ' the beast 
with many heads.' 

It is thus that he measures the man he contends with, 
the antagonist who is but ' the horn and noise of the 
monster' : — 

' Thou injurious Tribune ! 

Within thine eyes sat twenty thousand deaths, 

In thy hands clenched as many millions, in 

Thy lying tongue both numbers, I would say, 

Thou liest, unto thee, with voice as free 

As I do pray the gods' (?) 

But there was a heroism of a finer strain than that at work 
in England then, imitating the graces of the gods to better 
purpose ; a heroism which must fight a harder field than that, 
which must fight its own great battles through alone, without 
acclamations, without spectators; which must come off vic- 
torious, and never count its ' cicatrices/ or claim ' the war's 
garland.' 



342 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

If we would know tlie secret of those struggles, those hard 
conflicts that were going on here then, in whose results all the 
future ages of mankind were concerned, we must penetrate 
with this Poet the secret of the Roman patrician's house ; we 
must listen, through that thin poetic barrier, to the great 
chief himself, the chief of the unborn age of a new civilization 
— the leader, and hero, and conqueror of the ages of Peace — 
as he enters "and paces his own hall, with the angry fire in 
his eyes, and utters there the words for which there is no 
utterance without — as he listens there anew to the argument 
of that for which he lives, and seeks to reconcile himself 
anew to that baseness which his time demands of him. 

We must seek, here, not the part of him only who endured 
long and much, but was, at last, provoked into a premature 
boldness, and involved in a fatal collision with the state, but 
that of him who endured to the end, who played his life-long 
part without self-betrayal. We must seek, here, not the part 
of the great martial chieftain only, but- the part of that heroic 
chief and leader of men and ages, who discovered, in the 
sixteenth century, when the chivalry of the sword was still 
exalting its standard of honour as supreme, when the law of 
the sword was still the world's law, that brute instinct was not 
the true valour, that there was a better part of it than instinct, 
though he knows and confesses, — though he is the first to 
discover, that instinct is a great matter. We must seek, here, 
the words, the very words of that part which we shall find 
acted elsewhere, — the part of the chief who was determined, 
for his part, ' to live and fight another day,' who was not 
willing to spend himself in such conflicts as those in which he 
saw his most illustrious contemporaries perish at his side, on 
his right hand and on his left, in the reign of the Tudor, and 
in the reign of the Stuart. And he has not been at all sparing 
of his hints on this subject over his own name, for those who 
have leisure to take them. 

' The moral of this fable is,' he says, commenting in a 
certain place, on the wisdom of the Ancients, ' that men should 
not be confident of themselves, and imagine that a discovery of 



THE ELIZABETHAN HEROISM. 343 

their excellences will always render them acceptable. For this 
can only succeed according to the nature and manners of the 
person they court or solicit, who, if he be a man not of the 
same gifts and endowments, but altogether of a haughty and 
insolent behaviour — {here represented by the person of Juno) — 
they must entirely drop the character that carries the least show 
of worth or gracefulness; if they proceed upon any other 
footing it is downright folly . Nor is it sufficient to act the 
deformity of obsequiousness, unless they really change themselves, 
and become abject and contemptible in their persons? This 
was a time when abject and contemptible persons could do 
what others could not do. Large enterprises, new develop- 
ments of art and science, the most radical social innovations, 
were undertaken and managed, and very successfully, too, in 
that age, by persons of that description, though not without 
frequent glances on their part, at that little, apparently some- 
what contradictory circumstance, in their history. 

But the fables in which the wisdom of the Moderns, and 
the secrets of their sages are lodged, are the fables we are un- 
locking here. Let us listen to these ' secrets of policy ' for 
ourselves, and not take them on trust any longer. 

A room in Coriolanus's house. 
[Enter Coriolanus and Patricians.] 

Cor. Let them, pull all about mine ears, present me 
Death on the wheel, or at wild horses' heels, 
Or pile ten hills on the Tarpeian rock 
That the precipitation might down stretch 
Below the beam of sight, yet will I still 
Be thus to them. 

[Under certain conditions that is heroism, no doubt.] 

First Patrician. You do the nobler. 

[For the question is of nobility.] 

Cor. I mnse my mother 

Does not approve me further. 

I talk of you. [To Volumnia]. 



344 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

Why did you wish me milder ? Would you have me 
False to my nature 1 Rather say I play 
The man I am. 
Vol. sir, sir, sir, 

I would have had you put your power well on 
Before you had worn it out. 

Lesser had been 
The thwarting of your dispositions, if 
You had not should them how you were disposed, 
Ere they lacked power to cross you. 

* # * * 

[Enter Menenius and Senators.'] 
Men. Come, come, you have been too rough 

Something too rough ; 

You must return, and mend it. 
1 Sen. There's no remedy, 

Unless, by not so doing, our good city 

Cleave in the midst and perish. 
Vol. Pray be counselled : 

/ have a heart as little apt as yours 

But yet a brain [hear] that leads my use of anger 

To better vantage. 
Men. Well said, noble woman ; 

Before he should thus stoop to the herd, but that 

The violent fit o' the time, craves it as physic 

For the whole state, I would put mine armour on, 

Which I can scarcely bear. 

[It is the diseased common-weal whose case this Doctor 
is undertaking. That is our subject.] 

Cor. What must I do ? 

Men. Return to the Tribunes. 

Cor. Well, 

What then ? what then % 

Men. Repent what you have spoke. 

Cor. For them ? I can not do it to the gods : 
Must I then do't to them 1 

Vol. You are too absolute ; 

Though therein you can never be too noble 
But when extremities speak. I have heard you say, 
Honor and policy [hear] like unsevered friends 
T the war do grow together : Grant that, and tell me. 
In peace, what each of them by the other loses 
That they combine not there ? 



THE ELIZABETHAN HEROISM. 345 

Cor. Tush ; tush ! 

Men. A good demand. 

Vol. If it be honor, iu your wars, to seem 

The same you are not, (which for your best ends 
Tou adopt your policy,) how is it less, or worse 
That it shall hold companionship in peace 
With honor, as in war ; since that to both 
It stands in like request ? 

Cor. Why force you this? [Truly.] 

Vol. Because that now, it lies on tou to speak 
To the people, not by your own instruction, 
Nor by the matter which your heart prompts you to, 
But with such words that are but roted in 
Tour tongue though but bastards and syllables 
Of no allowance, to your bosom's truth. 
Now this no more dishonors you at all, 
Than to take in a town with gentle words, 
Which else would put you to your fortune, and 
The hazard of much blood. — [Hear.] 
I would dissemble with my nature, where 
My fortune and my friends at stake required 
I should do so in honor. I am in this ; 
Your wife, your son, these senators, the nobles, 
And you will rather show our general lowts 
How you can frown, than spend a fawn upon them. 
For the inheritance of their loves, and safe-guard 
Of what that want might ruin [hear] 

Noble lady ! 
Come go with us. Speak fair : you may salve so, 

[It is the diseased common-weal we talk of still.] 

You may salve so, 
Not what is dangerous present, but the loss 
Of what is past. 

[That was this Doctor's method, who was a Doctor of Laws 
as well as Medicine, and very skilful in medicines ' palliative' 
as well as ' alterative.'] 

Vol. I pry'thee now, my son, 

Go to them with this bonnet in thy hand, 
And thus far having stretched it {here be with them), 
Thy knee bussing the stones, for in such business 
Action is eloquence, and the eyes of the ignorant 
More learned than the ears — waving thy head, 
Which often thus, correcting thy stout heart, 
Now humble as the ripest mulberry 



346 THE CURE OF THE COMMON WEAL. 

That will not hold the handling : or say to them 

Thou art their soldier, and being bred in broils. 

Hast not the soft way, which thou dost confess 

Were fit for thee to use, as they to claim, 

In asking their good loves ; but thou wilt frame 

Thyself forsooth hereafter theirs, so far 

As thou hast power and person.' 

' Pry'thee now 
Go and be ruled : although 1 know thou hadst rather 
Follow thine enemy in a fiery gulf 
Than flatter him in a bower. Here is Cominius. 

[Enter Cominius.'] 

Com. I have been V the market-place, and, sir, His fit 
You make strong party, or defend yourself 
By calmness, or by absence. All' s in anger. 
Men. Only fair speech. 

I think 'twill serve, if he 
Can thereto frame his spirit. 

Vol. He must, and will. 

Pry'thee now say you will and go about it. 

Cor. Must I go show them my unbarbed sconce ] Must I 
With my base tongue, give, to my noble heart 
A lie that it must bear ? Well, I will do't : 
Yet were there but this single plot to lose, 
This mould of Marcius, they, to dust should grind it, 
And throw it against the wind ; — to the market-place ; 
You have put me now to such a part, which never 
/ shall discharge to the life. 

Com. Come, come, we'll prompt you. 

Vol. I pry'thee now, sweet son, as thou hast said, 

My praises made thee first a soldier [ — Volumnia — ], so 
To have my praise for this, perform a part 
Thou hast not done before. 

Cor. Well, I must do't. 

Away my disposition, and possess me 
Some harlot's spirit ! My throat of war be turned, 
Which quired with my drum into a pipe] 
Small as an eunuch's or the virgin voice 
That babies lulls asleep ! The smiles of knaves 
Tent in my cheeks ; and school-boy's tears take up 
The glasses of my sight ! A beggar's tongue 
Make motion through my lips; and my arm'd knees 
Who bowed but in my stirrup, bend like his 
That hath received an alms. I will not do't, 



THE ELIZABETHAN HEROISM. 347 

Lest I surcease to honor mine own truth, 

And by my body's action teach my mind 

A most inherent baseness. 
Vol. At thy choice, thenj 

To beg of thee, it is my more dishonor 

Than thou of them. Come all to ruin ; let 

Thy mother rather feel thy pride, than fear 

Thy dangerous stoutness, for I mock at death 

"With as big a heart as thou. Do as thou list. 

Thy valiantness was mine, thou suck'dst it from me, 

But owe thy pride thyself. 
Cor. Pray be content. 

Mother I am going to the market place, 

Chide me no more. I'll mountebank their loves, 

Cog their hearts from them, and come back beloved 

Of all the trades in Rome. — [That he will — ] Look I am going. 

Commend me to my wife. I'll return Consul [ — That he will — ] 

Or never trust to what my tongue can do, 

1' the way of flattery further. 
Vol. Do your will. [Exit] 

Com. Away, the tribunes do attend you : arm yourself 

To answer mildly ; for they are prepared 

With accusations as I hear more strong 

Than are upon you yet. 
Cor. The word is mildly : Pray you let us go, 

Let them accuse me by invention, I 

Will answer in mine honor. 
Men. Ay, but mildly. 

Cor. Well, mildly be it then, mildly. 

[The Forum. Enter Coriolanus and, his party.] 

Tribune. Well, here he comes. 

Men. Calmly, I do beseech you. 

Cor. Ay, as an ostler, that for the poorest piece 

Will bear the knave by the volume. 

The honoured gods 

Keep Eome in safety, and the chairs of justice 

Supplied with worthy men ; plant love among us. 

Throng our large temples with the shows of peace, 

And not our streets with war. 
Sen. Amen ! Amen ! 

Men. A noble wish. 

Thus far the Poet: but the mask through which he speaks 
is wanted for other purposes, for these occasional auto-biogra- 



348 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

phical glimpses are but the side play of the great historical 
exhibition which is in progress here, and are introduced in 
entire subordination to its requisitions. 

It is, indeed, an old story into which all this Elizabethan 
history is crowded. That mimic scene in which the great 
historic instances in the science of human nature and 
human life were brought out with such scientific accuracy, and 
with such matchless artistic power and splendour, was, in fact, 
what the Poet himself, who ought to know, tells us it is; with 
so much emphasis, — not merely the mirror of nature in gene- 
ral, but the daguerreotype of the then yet living age, the 
plate which was able to give to the very body of it, its form and 
pressure. That is what it was. And what is more, it was the 
only Mirror, the only Spectator, the only Times, in which the 
times could get reflected and deliberated on then, with any 
degree of freedom and vivacity. And yet there were minds 
here in England then, as acute, as reflective, as able to lead the 
popular mind as those that compose our leaders and reviews to- 
day. There was a mind here then, reflecting not ' ages past ' 
only, but one that had taken its knowledge of the past from 
the present, that found ' in all men's lives,' a history figuring 
the nature of the times deceased; prophetic also: and this was 
the mind of the one who writes ' spirits are not finely touched 
but to fine issues/ 

They had to take old stories, — these sly, ambitious aspirants 
to power, who were not disposed to give up their natural right 
to dictate, for the lack of an organ, or because they found the 
proper insignia of their office usurped : it was necessary that 
they should take old stories, or invent new ones, l to make those 
slights upon the banks of Thames, that so did take ' not ' Eliza 
and our James ' only, but that people of whom ' Eliza and our 
James ' were only ' the outstretched shadows,' ' the monster/ of 
whose ' noise ' these sovereigns, as the author of this play took 
it, were ' but the horn.' 

They had to take old stories of one kind and another, as they 
happened to find them, and vamp them up to suit their pur- 
poses; stories, old or new, they did not much care which. 



THE ELIZABETHAN HEROISM. 349 

Old and memorable ones, so memorable that the world herself 
with her great faculty of oblivion, could not forget them, but 
carried them in her mind from age to age, — stories so memor- 
able that all men knew them by heart, — so the author could 
find one to his purpose, — were best for some things, — for many 
things ; but for others new ones must be invented ; and cer- 
tainly there would be no difficulty as to that, for lack of gifts 
at least, in the mind whence these old ones were coming out 
so freshly, in the gloss of their new-coined immortality. 

It is, indeed, an old story that we have here, a story of that 
ancient Rome, whose ' just, free and flourishing state,' the author 
of this new science of policy confesses himself, — underhisuniversal 
name, — so childishly enamoured of, that he interests himself in 
it to a degree of passion, though he ' neither loves it in its birth 
or its decline/ — [under its kings or its emperors.] — It is a story 
of Republican Rome, and the difference, the radical difference, 
between the civil magistracy which represented the Roman 
people, and that unconstitutional popular power which the 
popular tyranny creates, is by no means omitted in the exposi- 
tion. That difference, indeed, is that which makes the repre- 
sentation possible ; it is brought out and insisted on, ' they 
choose their officers ;' it is a difference which is made much of, for 
it contains one of the radical points in the poetic intention. 

But without going into the argument, the large and com- 
prehensive argument, of this most rich and grave and splendid 
composition, crowded from the first line of it to the last, with 
the results of a political learning which has no match in letters, 
which had none then, which has none now; no, or the world 
would be in another case than it is, for it is a political learning 
which has its roots in the new philosophy, it is grounded in 
the philosophy of the nature of things, it is radical as the 
Prima Philosophia, — without attempting to exhaust the mean- 
ing of a work embodying through all its unsurpassed vigor 
and vivacity of poetic representation, the new philosophic 
statesman's ripest lore, the patient fruits of ' observation 
strange,' — without going into his argument of the whole, 
the reader who merely wishes to see for himself, at a glance, 



350 THE CURE OF THE COMMON WEAL. 

in a word, as a matter of curiosity merely; whether the view 
here given of the political sagacity and prescience of the 
Elizabethan Man of Letters, is in the least chargeable with 
exaggeration, has only to look at the context of that revolu- 
tionary speech and proposal, that revolutionary burst of elo- 
quence which has been here claimed as a proper historical issue of 
the age of Elizabeth. He will not have to read very far to 
satisfy himself as to that. It will be necessary, indeed, for 
that purpose, that he should have eyes in his head, eyes not 
purely idiotic, but with the ordinary amount of human specu- 
lation in them, and, moreover, it will be necessary that he 
should use them, — as eyes are ordinarily used in such cases, — 
nothing more. But unfortunately this is just the kind of 
scrutiny which nobody has been able to bestow on this work 
hitherto, on account of those historical obstructions with 
which, at the time it was written, it was found necessary to 
guard such discussions, discussions running into such delicate 
questions in a manner so essentially incomparably free. 

For, in fact, there is no plainer piece of English extant, 
when one comes to look at it. All that has been claimed in 
the Historical part of this work,* may be found here without 
any research, on the mere surface of the dialogue. Looking 
at it never so obliquely, with never so small a fraction of an 
eye, one cannot help seeing it. 

The reader who would possess himself of the utmost mean- 
ing of these passages, one who would comprehend their farthest 
reaches, must indeed be content to wait until he can carry 
with him into all the parts that knowledge of the author's 
general intention in this work, which only a most thorough 
and careful study of it will yield. 

It is, indeed, a work in which the whole question of govern- 
ment is seized at its source — one in which the whole difficulty 
of it is grappled with unflinching courage and veracity. It 
is a work in which that question of classes in the state, which 
lies on the surface of it, is treated in a general, and not exclu- 

* Not published in this volume. 



ELIZABETHAN HEROISM. 35 1 

sive manner ; or, where the treatment is narrowed and pointed, 
as it is throughout in the running commentary, it is narrowed 
and pointed to the question of the then yet living age, and to 
those momentous developments of it which, 'in their weak 
beginnings,' the philosophic eye had detected, and not to a 
state of things which had to cease before the first Punic war 
could be begun. 

The question of classes, and their respective claims in 
governments, is indeed incidentally treated here, but in this 
author's own distinctive manner, which is one that is sure to 
take out, always — even in his lightest, most sportive handling 
— the heart of his subject, so as to leave little else but glean- 
ings to the author who follows in that track hereafter. 

For this is one of those unsurpassably daring productions of 
the Elizabethan Muse, which, after long experiment, encou- 
raged by that protracted immunity from suspicion, and stimu- 
lated by the hurrying on of the great crisis, it threw out 
at last in the face and eyes of tyranny, Things which are but 
intimated in the earlier plays — political allusions, which are 
brought out there amid crackling volleys of conceits, under 
cover of a battery of quips and jests — political doctrines, which 
lie there wrapped in thickest involutions of philosophic sub- 
tleties, are all unlocked and open here on the surface : he that 
runs may take them if he will. 



352 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 



CHAPTER II. 

CRITICISM OF THE MARTIAL GOVERNMENT. 

' Would you proceed especially agaiust Caius Marcius?' 
' Against him first: He 's a very dog to the commonalty.' 

TN this exhibition of the social orders to which human society 
■*- instinctively tends, and that so-called state into which 
human combinations in barbaric ages rudely settles, the prin- 
ciple of the combination — the principle of gradation, and 
subjection, and permanence — is called in question, and ex- 
posed as a purely instinctive principle, as, in fact, only a prin- 
ciple of revolution disguised ; and a higher one, the distinctively 
human element, the principle of kind, is now, for the first 
time, demanded on scientific grounds, as the essential principle 
of any permanent human combination — as the natural princi- 
ple, the only one which the science of nature can recognise as 
a principle of STATE. 

It is the PEACE principle which this great scientific war- 
hater and captain of the ages of peace is in search of, with his 
new organum ; though he is philosopher enough to know that, in 
diseased states, wars are nature's own rude remedies, her bar- 
barous surgery, for evils yet more unendurable. He has found 
himself chosen a justice of the peace — the world's peace; and 
it is the principle of permanence, of law and subjection — in a 
word, it is the principle of state, as opposed to revolution and 
dissolution — which he is judging of in behalf of his kind. 
And he makes a business of it. He goes about in his own 
fashion. He gets up this great war-piece on purpose to 
find it. 

He has got a state on his stage, which is ceasing to be a 
state at the moment in which he shows it to us; a state 



CRITICISM OF THE MARTIAL GOVERNMENT. 353 

which has the war principle — the principle of conquest within 
no longer working in it insidiously as government, but de- 
veloped as war; for it has just overstepped the endurable 
point in its mastery. It is a revolution that is coming off when 
the curtain rises. For the government has been gnawing the 
Eoman common- weal at home, with those same teeth it ravened 
the Volscians with abroad, till it has reached the vitals at last, 
and the common-weal has betaken itself to the Volscian's 
weapons: — the people have risen. They are all out when 
the play begins on an armed hunt for their rat-like, gnawing, 
corn-consuming rulers. They are determined to ' kill them,' 
and have ' corn at their own price.' ' If the wars eat us not, 
they will,' is the word; c and there's all THE love they bear 
us.' ' Rome and her rats are at the point of battle/ cries the 
Poet. The one side shall have hale, is his prophecy. 'Without 
good nature, 1 he says elsewhere, using the term good in its 
scientific sense, 'men are only a nobler kind of vermin'; 
and he makes a most unsparing application of this principle in 
his criticisms. Many a splendid historical figure is made to 
show its teeth, and rat-like mien and propensities, through all 
the splendour of its disguises, merely by the application of his 
simple philosophical tests. For the question, as he puts it, is 
the question between animal instinct, between mere appetite, 
and reason; and the question incidentally arises in the course 
of the exhibition, whether the common- weal, when it comes 
to anything like common-sense, is going to stand being 
gnawed in this way, for the benefit of any individual, or clique, 
or party. 

For the ground on which the classes or estates, and their 
respective claims to the government, are tried here, is the 
ground of the common- weal; and the question as to the fitness 
of any existing class in the state for an exclusive, unlimited 
control of the welfare of the whole, is more than suggested. 
That which stops short of the weal of the whole for its end, 
is that which is under criticism here ; and whether it exist in 
• the one,' or ' the few,' or ' the many/ — and these are the 
terms that are employed here, — whether it exist in the civil 

A A 



354 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

magistracy, sustained by a popular submission, or in the power 
of the victorious military chief, at the head of his still extant 
and resistless armament, it is necessarily rejected as a principle 
of sovereignty and permanence, in this purely scientific view of 
the human conditions of it. It is a question which this author 
handles with a thorough impartiality, in all his political treatises, 
let them come in what name and form they will, with more or 
less clearness, indeed, as the circumstances seem to dictate. 

But nowhere is the whole history of the military government, 
collected from the obscurity of the past, and brought out with 
such inflexible design — with such vividness and strength of 
historic exhibition, as it is here. It is traced to its beginnings 
in the distinctions which nature herself creates, — those phy- 
sical, and moral, and intellectual distinctions, with which she 
crowns, in her happier moods, the large resplendent brows of 
her born kings and masters. It is traced from its origin in the 
crowning of the victorious chief on the field of battle, to the 
moment in which the sword of military conquest is turned 
back on the conquerors by the chief into whose hands they 
gave it; and the sword of conquest abroad becomes, at home, 
the sword of state. 

Nay, this Play goes farther, and embraces the contingency 
of a foreign rule — one, too, in which the conqueror takes his 
surname from the conquest ; it brings home ' the enemy of the 
whole state,' as a king, in triumph to the capital, whose streets 
he has filled with mourning; and though the author does not 
tell us in this case, at he does in another, that the nation was 
awed 'with an offertory of standards' in the temple, and that 
'orisons and Te Deums were again sung,' — the victor 'not 
meaning that the people should forget too soon that he came in 
by battle — points, not much short of that, in the way of speciality, 
are not wanting. More than one conqueror, indeed, looks out 
from this old chieftain's Eoman casque. ' There is a little touch 
of Harry in the scene ' ; and though the author goes out of his 
way to tell us that ' he must by no means say his hero is 
covetous,' it will not be the Elizabethan Philosopher's fault, 
if we do not know which Harry it is that says — 



CRITICISM OF THE MARTIAL GOVERNMENT. 355 

' If you have writ your annals true, 'tis there, 
That like an eagle in a dove-cote, I 
Flutter'd your Volsces in Corioli : 
Alone, I did it. 

* * * * 

Auf. Eead it, nohle lords ; 

But tell the traitor, in the highest degree 

He hath abused your powers. 
Cor. Traitor ! — How now ? 
Auf. Ay, traitor, Marcius. 

Cor. Marcius ! 

Auf. Ay, Marcius, Caius Marcius ; Dost thou think 

I'll grace thee with that robbery, thy stolen name 

Coriolanus in Corioli ? ' — [the conqueror in the conquest.] 

Never, indeed, was ' the garland of war/ whether glistening 
freshly on the hero's brow on the fresh battle-field, or whether 
glittering, transmuted into civic gold and gems, on the brow of 
his hereditary successor, subjected to such a searching process 
before, as that with which the Poet, under cover of an aris- 
tocrat's pretensions, and especially under cover of his preten- 
sions to an elective magistracy, can venture to test it. 

This hero, who ' speaks of the people as if he were a god to 
punish, and not a man of their infirmity,' is on trial for that 
pretension from the first scene of this Play to the last. The 
author has, indeed, his own views of the fickle, ignorant, 
foolish multitude, — such views as any one, who had occasion 
to experiment on it personally, in the age of Elizabeth, would 
not lack the means of acquiring ; and amidst those ebullitions 
of wrath, which he pours from his haughty hero's lips, one 
hears at times a tone that sounds a little like some other things 
from the same source, as if the author had himself, in some 
way, been brought to look at the subject from a point of ob- 
servation, not altogether unlike that from which his hero 
speaks; or as if he might, at least, have known how to sym- 
pathise with the haughty and unbending nature, that had been 
brought into such deadly collision with it. But in the dramatic 
representation, though it is far from being a flattering one, we 
listen in vain for any echo of this sentiment. In its rich and 
kindly humour there is no sneer, no satire. It is the loving 

A A 2 



356 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

eye of nature's own great pupil — it is the kindly human eye, 
that comes near enough to point those jests, and paint so truly; 
there is a great human heart here in the scene embracing 
the lowly. It was the heart that was putting forth then 
its silent but resistless energies into the ages of the human 
advancement, to take up the despised and rejected masses of 
men from their misery, and make of them truly one kind and 
kindred. 

And though he has had, indeed, his own private expe- 
riences with the multitude, and the passions are, as he inti- 
mates — at least as strong in him as in another, he has his own 
view, also, of the common pitifulness and weakness of the 
human conditions; and he has a view which is, in his time, 
all his own, of the instrumentalities that are needed to reach 
that level of human nature, and to lift men up from the mire 
of these conditions, from the wrong and wretchedness into 
which, in their unaided, unartistic, unlearned struggle with 
nature, — within and without, — the kind are fallen. And so 
strong in him is the sense of this pitifulness, that it predo- 
minates over the sharpness of his genius, and throws the 
divinest mists and veils of compassion over the harsh, scientific 
realities he is constrained to lay bare. 

And, in fact, it takes this monstrous pretence, and claim to 
human leadership, which he finds passing unquestioned in his 
time, to bring him out on this point fairly. The statesman- 
ship of the man who undertakes to make his own petty per- 
sonality the measure of a world, who would make, not that 
reason which is in us all, and embraces the world, and which 
is not personal, — not that conscience which is the sensibility 
to reason, and is as broad and impartial as that — which goes 
with the reason, and embraces, like that, without bias, the 
common weal, — but that which is particular, and private, and 
limited to the individual, — his senses, — his passions, his pri- 
vate affections, — his mere caprice, — his mere will; the motive 
of the public action; — the statesmanship of the man who 
dares to offer these to an insulted world, as reasons of state; 
who claims a divine prerogative to make his single will good 



CRITICISM OF THE MARTIAL GOVERNMENT. 357 

against reason ; who claims a divine right to make his private 
interest outweigh the weal of the whole; who asks men to 
obliterate, in their judgment, its essential principle, that which 
makes them men, the eternal principle of the whole ; — this is 
the phenomenon which provokes at last, in this author, the 
philosophic ire. The moment this thing shows itself on his 
stage, he puts his pity to sleep. He will show up, at last, 
without any mercy, in a purely scientific manner, as we see 
more clearly elsewhere, the common pitifulness of the human 
conditions, in the person of him who claims exemption from 
them, — who speaks of the people as if he were a god to 
punish, and not a man of their infirmity. 

' There is formed in every thing a double nature; — this 
author, who is the philosopher of nature, tells us on another 
page, — ' there is formed in every thing a double nature OF GOOD, 
the one as everything is a total or substantive in itself, the other 
as it is a part or member of a greater body; whereof the latter 
is in degree the greater and the worthier, because it tends 
to the conservation of a more general form. Therefore we see 
the iron in particular sympathy moving to the loadstone ; but 
yet, if it exceed a certain quantity, it forsakes the affection to 
the loadstone, and, like a good patriot, moves to the earth. 
This double nature of good is much more (hear) — much more 
engraven on man, if he ^generate not — (decline not 
from the law of his kind — for that more is SPECIAL) unto 
whom the conservation of duty to the public onght to be 
much more precious than the conservation of life and being, 
according to that memorable speech of Pompey the Great, 
[the truly great, for this is the question of greatness,] when 

BEING IN COMMISSION OF PURVEYANCE FOR A FAMINE AT 

Rome, and being dissuaded, with great vehemency and in- 
stance, by his friends about him, that he should not hazard 
himself to sea in an extremity of weather, answered, ' Necesse 
est ut earn, non ut vivam.' ' 

But we happen to have set out here, in our play, at the very 
beginning of it, the specific case alluded to, in this general 
exhibition of the radical human law, viz., the case of a 



358 THE CURE OP THE COMMON-WEAL. 

famine in Kome, which we shall find differently treated, in 
this instance, by the person who aspires to ' the helm o' the 
state.' 

When the question is of the true nobility and greatness, of 
the true statesmanship, of the personal fitness of an individual 
to assume the care of the public welfare, the question, of 
course, as to this double nature, comes in. We wish to know 

— if any thing is going to depend upon his single will in the 
matter, we must know, which of these two natures is sove- 
reign in himself, — which good he supremely affects, — that of 
his senses, passions, and private affections, that good which ends 
in his private and particular nature, — a good which has its 
due place in this system, and is not unnaturally mortified 
and depressed, as it is in less scientific ones, — or that good 
of the whole, which is each man's highest good; — whether 
he is, in fact, a man, or whether, in the absence of that 
perfection of the human form, which should be the end 
of science and government, he approximates at all, — or 
undertakes to approximate at all, to the true human type; 

— whether he be, indeed, a man, in the higher sense of 
that word, or whether he ranks in the scale of nature, 
as ' only a nobler kind of vermin/ a man, a noble man, 
a man with a divine ideal and ambition, degenerate into 
that. 

When it is a candidate for the chief magistracy, a candidate 
for the supreme power in the state, who is on his trial, of 
course that question as to the balance between the public and 
private affections, which those who know how to trace this 
author's hand, know he is so fond of trying elsewhere, is sure 
to come up. The question is, as to whether there is any 
affection in this claimant for power, so large and so noble, 
that it can embrace heartily the common weal, and take 
that to be its good. The trial will be a sharp one. The 
trial of human greatness which is magnanimity, must 
needs be. The question is, as to whether this is a nature 
capable of pursuing that end for its own sake, without 
respect to its pivate and merely selfish recompence; whe- 



CRITICISM OF THE MARTIAL GOVERNMENT. 359 

ther it is one which has any such means of egress from 
its particular self, any such means of coming out of its 
private and exclusive motivity, that it can persevere in 
its care of the Common Weal, through good and through 
ill report, through personal wrong and ingratitude, — abandon- 
ing its private claim, and ascending by that conquest to the 
divineness. 



360 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 



CHAPTEE III. 
' insurrection's arguing/ 

' What 13 granted them?' 

4 Five Tribunes to defend their vulgar wisdoms.' 

1 The rabble should have first unroofed the city, 
Ere so prevailed with me.' 

rpHE common people themselves have some inkling of this. 
This Roman who has established his claim to rule Romans 
at home, by killing Volscians abroad, appears to their simple 
apprehension, at the moment, at least, when they find them- 
selves suffering the gnawings of hunger through his legisla- 
tion, to have established but a questionable claim to their 
submission. 

And before ever he shows his head on the stage, this ques- 
tion, which is the question of the play, is already started. 
For it is the people who are permitted to come on first of all 
and explain their wants, and discuss the military hero's quali- 
fications for rule in that relation, and that, too, in a not alto- 
gether foolish manner. For though the author knows how to 
do justice to the simplicity of their politics, he knows how to 
do justice also to that practical determination and straightfor- 
wardness and largeness of sense, which even in the common 
sense of uneducated masses, is already struggling a little to 
declare itself. 

They have one great piece of political learning which their 
lordly legislators lack, and for lack of sense and comprehen- 
sion cannot have. They are learned in the doctrine of their 
own political and social want; they are full of the most accu- 
rate and vivid impressions on that subject. Their notions of 
it are altogether different from those vague general abstract 



'insurrection's arguing.' 361 

conceptions of it, which the brains of their refined lordly 
rulers stoop to admit. The terms which that legislation deals 
with, are one thing in the patrician's vocabulary, and another 
and quite different thing in the plebeian's; hunger means one 
thing in the ' patrician's vocabulary,' and another and very 
different thing in the plebeian's. They know, too, ' that meat 
was made for mouths,' and ' that the gods sent not corn for the 
rich men only.' They are under the impression that there 
ought to be bread for them by some means or other, when the 
storehouses that their toil has filled are overflowing, and 
though they are not clear as to the process which should ac- 
complish this result, they have come to the conclusion that 
there must be some error somewhere in the legislation of those 
learned few, to whom they have resigned the task of govern- 
ing them. They are strongly of opinion that there must be 
some mistake in the calculations by which those venerable wise 
men and fathers, do so infallibly contrive to sweep the results 
of the poor man's toil and privation into their own garners, — cal- 
culations which enable the legislator to enjoy in lordly ease and 
splendour, the sight of the plebeian's misery, which enable him to 
lavish on his idlest whims, to give to his dogs that which 
would save lifetimes of unreckoned human misery. These are 
their views, and when the play begins, they have resolved 
themselves into a committee of the whole, and are out on a 
commission of inquiry and administrative reform, armed with 
bats and clubs and other weapons, — such as came first to hand, 
intending to make short work of it. This is their peace bud- 
get, and as to war, they have some rude notions on that sub- 
ject, too ; — some dim impression that nature intended them for 
some other ends than to be sold in the shambles, as the pur- 
chase of some lordly chieftain's title. There's an incipient 
statesmanship struggling there in that rude mass, though it 
does not as yet get fairly expressed. It will take the tribune- 
ship and the refinements of the aristocratic leisure, to make the 
rude wisdom of want and toil eloquent. But it has found 
a tribune at last, who will be able to speak for it, through one 
mouth or another, scientifically and to the purpose too, ere all 
is done. 



362 THE CURE OF THE COMMON WEAL. 

' Before we proceed any further, hear me speak' he cries, 
through the Roman leader's lips ; for his Eome, too, if it be 
not yet ' at the point of battle,' is drifting towards it rapidly, 
as he sees well enough when this speech begins. 

But let us take the Play as we find it. Take the first scene 
of it. The stage is filled with the people, — not with their repre- 
sentatives, — but with the people themselves, in their own per- 
sons, in the act of taking the government into their own 
hands. They are hurrying sternly and silently through the 
city streets. There has been no practising of ' goose step,' to 
teach them that movement. They are armed with clubs, 
staves and other weapons, peace weapons, but there is an edge 
in them now, fine enough for their purpose. The word of the 
play is the word that arrests that movement. The voice of 
the leader rings out, — it is a halt that is ordered. 

' Before we proceed any further, hear me speak,' 
cries one from the mass. 

' Speak ! speak !' is the reply. They are ready to hear 
reason. They want a speaker. They want a voice, though 
never so rude, to put their stern inarticulate purpose ' into 
some frame.' 

' You are all resolved rather TO die than TO FAMISH,' con- 
tinues the first speaker. Yes, that is it precisely; he has 
spoken the word. 

'Resolved! resolved!' is the common response; for 
the revolutionary point is touched here. 

1 First, you know, Caius Marcius is chief enemy to the 
people' — a rude grasp at causes. This captain will establish a 
common intelligence in his company, before they proceed any 
further ; that their acting may be one, and to purpose. For 
there is no command but that here. 

Cit. We know 't, we know 't. 

First Cit. Let us kill him, and we '11 have corn at our own price. Is 't 
a verdict 1 

Cit. No more talking on 't. Let it be done : away, away. 

' One word, good citizens,' cries another, who thinks that 
the thing will bear, perhaps, a little further discussion. 



'insurrection's arguing.' 363 

And this is the hint for the first speaker to produce his 
cause more fully. ' Good citizens,' is the word he takes up. 
• We are accounted POOR CITIZENS; the patricians GOOD.' 
[That is the way the account stands, then.] ' What autho- 
rity surfeits on would relieve us. If they would yield us but 
the superfluity while it were wholesome, we might guess they 
relieved us humanely ; but they think we are too dear.' [They 
love us as we are too well. They want poor people to reflect 
their riches. It takes plebeians to make patricians; it takes 
our valleys to make their heights.] 

' The leanness that afflicts us, the object of our misery, is as an inven- 
tory to particularize their abundance. Our sufferance is a gain to them. — 
Let us reveDge this with our pikes, ere we become rakes : for the gods 
know, I speak this in hunger for bread, and not in thirst for revenge. 

Second Cit. Would you proceed especially against Caius Marcius ? 

First Cit. Against him first ; — he 's a very dog to the commonalty. 

Second Cit. Consider you what services he has done for his country ? 

[That is one of the things which are about to be ' con- 
sidered.'] 

First Cit. Very well, and could be, content to give him good report 
for 'it, but that he pays himself with being proud. 

Second Cit. Nay, but speak not maliciously. 

First Cit. I say unto y'ou, what he hath done famously, he did it to 
that end: though soft-conscienced men can be content to say it was for 
HIS COUNTRY, h/gdid it to please his mother, and to be partly proud; which 
he is, even t% the altitude of his virtue. 

Second Cit. What he cannot help in his nature, you account a vice 
in him. You must in no way say he is covetous. 

Fir it Cit. If I must not, I need not be barren of accusations ; he hath 
f au lts with surplus to tire in repetition. [Shouts within.] What shouts 
ar<* these 1 The other side 0' the city is risen. Why stay we prating 
hei-e? To the Capitol ! 

&it. Come, come. 

l ? irst Cit. Soft ; who comes here 1 

[Enter Menenius Agrippa.] 

Second Cit. Worthy Menenius Agrippa, one that hath always loved 
the people. 

First Cit. He's one honest enough [ — honest — a great word in the 
Shakspere philosophy] ; would all the rest were so. 

[That is a good prayer when it comes to be understood.] 



364 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

Men. What work % my countrymen, in hand 1 "Where go you, 
With bats and clubs 1 The matter 1 Speak, I pray you. 
First Cit. Our business is not unknown to the Senate [Hear] ; they 
have had inkling this fortnight what we intend to do, which now we '11 
show 'em in deeds. They say, poor suitors have strong breaths ; they 
shall know we have strong arms, too. 

Men. Why, masters, my good friends, mine honest neighbours, 
Will you undo yourselves ? 
First Cit. We cannot, sir ; we are undone already. [Revohition.] 
Men. I tell you, friends, most charitable care 

Have the patricians of you. For your wants, — 
Your suffering in this dearth, you may as well 
Strike at the heavens with your staves, as lift them 
Against the Roman State, whose course will on 
The way it takes, cracking ten thousand curbs 
Of more strong link asunder, than can ever 
Appear in your impediment. For the dearth, 
The gods, not the patricians, make it ; and 
Your knees to them, not arms, must help.* Alack ! 
You are transported by calamity, 
Thither where more attends you ; and you slander 
The helms 0' the state, who care for you like fathers, 
When you curse them as enemies. 
First Cit. Care for us ! True, indeed ! They ne'er cared for us yet. 
Suffer us to famish, and their store-houses crammed with grain ! 
Make edicts for usury, to support usurers ! Repeal daily any wholesome 
act established against the rich, and provide more piercing statutes daily 
to chain up and restrain the poor ! If the wars eat us not up, they 
will ; and there's all the love they bear us. 

Menenius attempts to counteract these Impression's; but his 
story and his arguments appear to have some appJ ications 
which he is not aware of, and are much more to the purpose 
of the party in arms than they are to his own. For it J s a 
story in which the natural subordination of the parts to t-be 
whole in the fabric of human society is illustrated by frbat 
natural instance and symbol of unity and organization 

* This sounds very pious, but it is not the piety of the new school- 
The doctrine of submission and suffering is indeed taught in it, and scieil"i _ 
tificallyreinforced ; but then it is the patient suffering of the harm 'which 
is not within our power' which is commendable, according to its tenets, 
and 'a wise and industrious suffering' of it, too. It is a wise ' accommo- 
dating of the nature of man to those points of nature and fortune whieh 
we cannot control,' that is pleasing to God, according to this creed. 



'insurrection's arguing.' 365 

which the single human form itself presents ; and that condi- 
tion of the state which has just been exhibited — one in which 
the body at large is dying of inanition that a part of it may 
surfeit — is a condition which, in the light of this story, ap- 
pears to need help of some kind, certainly. 

But the platform is now ready. It is the hero's entrance 
for which we are preparing. It is on the ground of this sullen 
w T ant that the author will exhibit him and his dazzling mili- 
tary virtues. It is as the doctor of this diseased common-weal 
that he brings him in with his sword; 

' Enter Caius Marcius.' 
and that idea — the idea of the diseased commonwealth, which 
Menenius has already set forth — that notion of parts and 
partiality, and dissonance and dissolution, which is a radical 
idea in the play, and runs into its minutest points of phraseo- 
logy, breaks out at once in his rough speech. 

Men. Hail, noble Marcius ! 

Mar. Thanks. What's the matter, you dissentious rogues, 

That rubbing the poor itch of your opinion, 

Make yourselves scabs. 

[It is the common-weal that must be made whole and comely. 

Opinion ! your opinion.] 

First Cit. "We have ever your good word. 

Mar. In that will give good words to thee, will flatter 

Beneath abhorring. — What would you have, you curs, 

That like nor peace, nor war ? the one affrights you, 

The other makes you proud. He that trusts you, 

Where he should find you lions, finds you hares. 

Where foxes, geese ! You are no surer, no 

Than is the coal of fire upon the ice, 

Or hail-stone in the sun. Your virtue is, 

To make him worthy whose offence subdues him, 

And curse that justice did it. Who deserves greatness 

Deserves your hate : and your affections are 

A sick man's appetite, who desires most that 

Which would increase his evil. He that depends 

Upon your favours, swims with fins of lead, 

And hews down oaks with rushes. Hang ye ! Trust ye ? 

With every minute you do change a mind ; 

[This is not the principle of state, whether in the many or 
the one]. 



366 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

And call him noble, that was now your hate, 

Him vile, that was your garland. What's the matter, 

That in these several places of the city 

You cry against the noble senate, who, 

Under the gods, keep you in awe, which else 

Would feed on one another ? — What's their seeking ? 

Men. For corn at their own rates ; whereof, they say, 
The city is well stored. 

Mar. Hang 'em ! They say 1 

They'll sit by the fire, and presume to know 

What's done f the Capitol": who's like to rise, 

Who thrives, and who declines : side factions, and give out 

Conjectural marriages ; making parties strong, 

And feebling such as stand not in their liking, 

Below their cobbled shoes. They say, there 's grain enough ? 

Would the nobility lay aside their ruth, 

And let me use my sword, Id make a quarry 

With thousands of these quartered slaves, as high 

As / could prick my lance. 

[The altitude of his virtue; — the measure of his greatness. 
That is the tableau of the first scene, in the first act of the 
play of the cure of the Common-weal and the Consulship.] 

Men. Nay, these are almost thoroughly persuaded ; 
For though abundantly they lack discretion, 
Yet are they passing cowardly. But I beseech you, 
What says the other troop ? 

Mar. They are dissolved: Hang 'em !* 

They said, they were an hungry ; sigK'd forth proverbs ; — 
That hunger broke stone walls ; that, dogs must eat ; 
That meat was made for mouths ; that the gods sent not 
Corn for the rich men only : — With these shreds 
They vented their complainings ; which being answer' d, 
And a petition granted them, a strange one, 
(To break the heart of generosity, [ — to leave it nothing to give — ] 
And make bold power look pale,) they threw their caps 
As they would hang them on the horns o'the moon, 
Shouting their emulation. 

Men. What is granted them. 

Mar. Five tribunes to defend their vulgar wisdoms, 
Of their own choice : One's Junius Brutus, 

* 'The History of Henry VII.,' produced in the Historical Part of 
this work, but omitted here. [Foot-note contains the key to these 
readings]. 



'insurrection's arguing.' 367 

Sicinius Velutus, and I know not — 'Sdeath ! 
The rabble should have first unroof'd the city ; 
Ere so prevail'd with me ; it will in time 
Win upon power, and throw forth greater themes 
For insurrection's arguing. 

[Yes, surely it will. It cannot fail of it.] 

Men. This is strange. 

Mar. Go, get you home, you fragments ! [fragments!] 

[Enter a Messenger!] 

Mes. "Where's Caius Marcius 1 
Mar. Here : What's the matter ? 
Mes. The news is, Sir, the Voices are in arms. 
Mar. I am glad on't ; then we shall have means to vent 
Our musty superfluity : — See, our best elders. 

[The procession from the Capitol is entering with two of the 
new officers of the commonwealth, and the two chief men of 
the army, with other senators.] 

First Sen. Marcius, 'tis true, that you have lately told us ; 

The Volsces are in arms. 
Mar. They have a leader, 

Tullus Aufidius, that will put you to't. 

I sin in envying his nobility : 

And were I anything but what I am, 

I would wish me only he. 
Com. You have fought together. 

Mar. Were half to half the world by the ears, and he 

Upon my party, Td revolt, to make 

Only my wars with him [Hear, hear]. 
He is a lion. 

That I am proud to hunt. 
First Sen. Then, worthy Marcius, 

Attend upon Cominius to these wars. 

It is the relation of the spirit of military conquest, the rela- 
tion of the military hero, and his government, to the true 
human need, which is subjected to criticism here; a criticism 
which is necessarily an after-thought in the natural order of 
the human development. 

The transition ' from the casque to the cushion,' that so 
easy step in the heroic ages, whether it be ' an entrance by 
conquest,' foreign or otherwise, or whether the chieftain's own 



368 THE CURE OF THE COMMON- WEAL. 

followers bring him home in triumph, and the people, whose 
battle he has won, conduct him to their chair of state, in either 
case, that transition appears, to this author's eye, worth going 
back, and looking into a little, in an age so advanced in civi- 
lization, as the one in which he finds himself. 

For though he is, as any one who will take any pains to 
inquire, may easily satisfy himself, — the master in chief of 
the new science of nature, — and the deepest in its secrets of 
any, his views on that subject appear to be somewhat broader, 
his aspirations altogether of another kind, from those, to which 
his school have since limited themselves. He does not con- 
tent himself with pinning butterflies and hunting down beetles; 
his scientific curiosity is not satisfied with classifying ferns and 
lichens, and ascertaining the proper historical position of pud- 
ding-stone and sand-stone, and in settling the difference be- 
tween them and their neighbours. Nature is always, in all 
her varieties wonderful, and all ' her infinite book of secrecy,' 
that book which all the world had overlooked till he came, 
was to his eye, from the first, a book of spells, of magic lore, a 
Prospero book of enchantments. He would get the key to 
her cipher, he would find the lost alphabet of her unknown 
tongue; there is no page of her composing in which he would 
scorn to seek it — none which he would scorn to read with 
it: but then he has, notwithstanding, some choice in his 
studies. He is of the opinion that some subjects, are nobler 
than others, and that those which concern specially the human 
kind, have a special claim to their regard, and the secret of 
those combinations which result in the varieties of shell-fish, 
and other similar orders of being, do not exclusively, or chiefly, 
engage his attention. 

There is another natural curiosity, which strikes the eye of 
the founder of the Science of Nature, as quite the most curious 
and wonderful thing going, so far, at least, as his observation 
has extended, though he is willing to make, as he takes pains 
to state, philosophical allowance for the partiality of species in 
determining this judgment, and is perfectly willing to concede, 
that if any particular species of shell-fish, for instance, were to 



e insurrection's arguing.' 369 

undertake a science of tilings in general, that particular species 
would, no doubt, occupy the principal place in that system; 
especially if arts, tending to the improvement and elevation of 
it, were necessarily based on this larger specific knowledge. 

Men, and their proceedings and organisms, men, and their 
habits and modes of combining, did appear to the eye of this 
scientific observer quite as well worth observing and noting, 
also, as bees and beavers, for instance, and their societies; and, 
accordingly, he made some observations himself, and notes, 
too, in this particular department of his general science. For, 
as he tells us elsewhere, he did not wish to map out the large 
fields of the science of observation in general, and exhibit to 
the world, in bare description, the method of it, without 
leaving some specimens of his own, of what might be done 
with it, in proper hands, under favourable circumstances, 
selecting for his experiments the principal and noblest subjects 

— those of the most immediate human concern. And he has 
not only very carefully laboured a few of these; but he has 
taken extraordinary pains to preserve them to us in their 
proper scientific form, with just as little of the ligature of the 
time on them as it was possible to leave. 

It is no kind of beetle or butterfly, then, that this philo- 
sopher comes down upon here from the heights of his universal 
science — his science of the nature of things in general, but 
that great Spenserian monstrosity, — that diseased product 
of nature, which individual human nature, in spite of its 
natural pettiness and helplessness, under certain favourable 
conditions of absorption and accretion, may be made to yield. 
It is that dragon of lawless power which was overspreading, 
in his time, all the common human affairs, and infolding in its 
gaudy, baleful wings all the life of men, — it is that which 
takes from the first the speculative eye of this new speculator, 

— this founder of the science of things, and not of words 
instead of them. Here is a man of science, a born naturalist, 
who understands that this phenomenon lies in his department, 
and takes it to be his business, among other things, to ex- 
amine it. 

B B 



370 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

It looks, indeed, somewhat formidable at a distance, but this 
philosopher has had some extraordinary facilities of approach 
to it; and after a very patient study of it, with the aid of his 
newly-invented instrument, he is prepared to show, that, after 
all, it is, at least, ' no good divinity,' and that there is, in fact, 
nothing but a man at the bottom of it. • There's a differency 
between a grub and a butterfly,' he observes, in reference to 
this point, ' yet your butterfly was a grub.' And though it 
has already ' grown from man to dragon,' ere he takes his ob- 
servation, though he perceives at a glance that it has ' wings,' 
and other faculties abnormal in the species, he is not afraid to 
undertake its natural history, though he proceeds very modestly, 
and evidently does not propose to himself any immediate return 
for his labour. But if you will follow him quietly, he will 
undertake to show you, that there is no more harmless thing 
in nature, when men once get the science of it. He has a 
table in his anatomical theatre long enough to lay those 
dragon wings on. He will take them to pieces before men's 
eyes, and show them in detail the mechanism, and lecture 
on the principle, for those who are able to hear it. He has 
studied the subject carefully. He has found the composition 
of that huge growth. He has found the combining principle 
in his prima philosophia. 

It was, indeed, a formidable phenomenon, as it presented 
itself to his apprehension; and his own words are always the 
best, when one knows how to read them — 

' He sits in state, like a thing made for Alexander.' ' When 
he walks, he moves like an engine, and the ground shrinks 
before his treading.' ' He talks like a knell, his hum is a 
battery; what he bids be done, is finished at his bidding. He 
wants nothing of a god but eternity, and a heaven to throne 
in.' 'Yes,' is the answer; 'yes, mercy, if you paint him 
truly.' ' I paint him in character.' 

' Is it possible that so short a time can alter the conditions 
of a maw?' inquires the speculator upon this phenomenon, and 
then comes the reply — ' There's a differency between a grub 
and a butterfly, yet your butterfly was a grub. This Marcius 



insurrection's arguing. 371 

is grown fro?n man to DRAGON; he has wings, he is more 
than a creeping thing.' 

This is Coriolanus at the head of his army; but in Julius 
Caesar, it is nature in the wildness of the tempest — it is a 
night of unnatural horrors, that is brought in by the Poet to 
illustrate the enormity of the evil he deals with, and its un- 
natural character — 'to serve as instrument of fear and warn- 
ing unto some monstrous state.' 

' Now could /, Casca, 
Name to thee a man most like this dreadful night ; 
That thunders, lightens, opens graves, and roars 
As doth the lion in the Capitol : 
A man no mightier than thyself, or me, 
In personal action, yet prodigious grown. 
And fearful, as these strange eruptions are. 
Casca. Tis Caesar that you mean : Is it not, Cassius ? 

[I paint him in character.] 

Cassius. Let it be — who it is : For Romans now 

Have thewes and limbs like to their ancestors.' 



B E 2 



372 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 



CHAPTER IV. 

POLITICAL RETROSPECT. 

1 I think he'll be to Rome 
As is the osprey to the fish, who takes it 
By sovereignty of nature.' 

' Flower of Warriors.' 

rpHE poet finds, indeed, this monstrosity full-blown in his 
-*- time. He finds it ' in the civil streets/ ' talking plain can- 
non/ ' humming batteries ' in the most unmistakeable manner, 
with no particular account of its origin to give, without, in- 
deed, appearing to recollect exactly how it came there, retain- 
ing only a general impression, that a descent from the celestial 
regions had, in some way, been effected during some undated 
period of human history, under circumstances which the 
memory of man was not expected to be able to recall in detail, 
and a certificate to that effect, divinely subscribed, was under- 
stood to be included among its properties, though it does not 
appear to have been, on the face of it, so absolutely conclusive 
as to render a little logical demonstration, on the part of 
royalty itself, superfluous. 

It was not very far from this time, that a very able and loyal 
servant of the crown undertook, openly, to assist the royal 
memory on this delicate point; and, though the details of that 
historical representation, and the manner of it, are, of course, 
quite different from those of the Play, it will be found, upon 
careful examination, not so dissimilar in purport as the exterior 
would have seemed to imply. The philosopher does not feel 
called upon, in either case, to begin by contradicting flatly, in 
so many words, the theory which he finds the received one on 
that point. Even the poet, with all his freedom, is compelled 
to go to work after another fashion. 



POLITICAL KETROSPECT. 373 

' And thus do we, of wisdom, and of reach, 
With windlasses, and with assays of bias, 
By indirections find directions out.' 

He has his own way of creating an historical retrospect. 
No one need know that it is a retrospect; no one will know 
it, perhaps, who has not taken the author's clue elsewhere. 
The crisis is already reached when the play begins. The 
collision between the civil want and the military government 
is at its height. It is a revolution on which the curtain rises. 
It is a city street filled with dark, angry swarms of men, who 
have come forth to seek out this government, in the person of 
its chief, who stop only to conduct their summary trial of it, 
and then hurry on to execute their verdict. 

But the poet arrests this revolution. Before we proceed 
any further, ' Hear me speak,' he cries, through the lips of the 
plebeian leader. The man of science demands a hearing, 
before this movement proceed any further. He has a longer 
story to tell than that with which Menenius Agrippa appeases 
his Romans. There is a cry of war in the streets. The obscure 
background of that portentous scene opens, and the long vista 
of the heroic ages, with all its pomp and stormy splendours, 
scene upon scene, grows luminous behind it. The foreground 
is the same. The arrested mutineers stand there still, with 
the frown knit in their angry brows, with the weapons of their 
civil warfare in their hands; there is no stage direction for a 
change of costume, and none perceives that they have grown 
older as they stand, and that the shadow of the elder time is 
on them. But the manager of this stage is one who knows 
that the elder time of history is the childhood of his kind. 

There is a cry of war in that ancient street. The enemy of 
the infant state is in arms. The people rush forth to conflict 
with the leader of armies at their head. But this time, for 
the first time in the history of literature, the philosopher goes 
with him. The philosopher, hitherto, has been otherwise 
occupied. He has been too busy with his fierce war of words; 
he has had too much to do with his abstract generals, his 
logical majors and minors, to get them in squadrons and right 



374 THE CURE OF THE COMMON- WEAL. 

forms of war, to have any eye for such vulgar solidarities. 
'All men are mortal. Peter and John are men. Therefore 
Peter and John are mortal,' he concludes; but that is his 
nearest and most vivacious approach to historical particulars, 
and his cell is broad enough to contain all that he needs for 
his processes and ends. He finds enough and to spare, ready 
prepared to his hands, in the casual, rude, unscientific obser- 
vations and spontaneous distinctions of the vulgar. His gene- 
ralizations are obtained from their hasty abstractions. It has 
never occurred to him, till now, that he must begin with criti- 
cising these terms ; that he must begin by making a new and 
scientific terminology, which shall correspond to terms in 
nature, and not be air-lines merely; — that he must take pains 
to collect them himself, from severest scrutiny of particulars, 
before ever he can arrive at ' the notions of nature,' the uni- 
versal notions, which differ from the spontaneous specific 
notions of men, and their chimeras; before ever he can put 
man into his true relations with nature, before ever he can 
teach him to speak the word which she responds to, — the 
words of her dictionary — the word which is power. 

This is, in fact, the first time that the philosopher has under- 
taken to go abroad. It is the first time he has ever been in 
the army. Softly, invisibly, he goes. There is nothing to 
show that he is there. As modestly, as unnoticed, as the 
Times ' own correspondent,' amid all the clang and tumult, the 
pomp and circumstance of glorious war, he goes. But he is 
there notwithstanding. There is no breath of scholasticism, 
no perfume of the cell, that the most vigorous and robust can 
perceive, in his battle. The scene unwinds with all its fierce 
reality, undimmed by the pale cast of thought: the shout is as 
wild, the din as fearful, the martial fury rises, as if the old 
heroic poet had it still in hand. 

But it is not the poet's voice that you hear, bursting forth 
into those rhythmical ecstasies of heroic passion, — unless that 
faint tone of exaggeration, — that slight prolonging of it, be 
his. That mad joy in human blood, that wolfish glare, that 
lights the hero's eye, gets no reflection in his : those fiendish 



POLITICAL RETROSPECT. 375 

boasts are not from his lips. Through all the frenzy of that 
demoniacal scene, he is still himself, with all his human sense 
about him. Through all the crowded incidents of that day of 
blood — into which he condenses, with dramatic license, the 
siege and assault of the city, the conquest and plunder of it, 
and the conflict in the open field, — he is keeping watch on his 
hero. He is eyeing him, and sketching him, as critically as if 
he were indeed an entomological or botanical specimen. He 
is making a specimen of him, for scientific purposes, — not ' a 
preservation,' — he does not think much of dried specimens in 
science. He proposes to dismiss the logical Peter and John, 
and the logical man himself, that abstract notion which the 
metaphysicians have been at loggerheads about so long. It is 
the true heroism, — it is the sovereign flower which he is in 
search of. This specimen that he is taking here will, indeed, go 
by the board. He is taking him on his negative table. But 
for that purpose, — in order to get him on his ' table of rejec- 
tions,' it is necessary to take him alive. The question is of 
government, of supreme power, and universal suffrage, of the 
abnegation of reason, of the annihilation of judgment, in 
behalf of a superiority which has been understood, heretofore, 
to admit of no question. The question is of awe and rever- 
ence, and worship, and submission. The Poet has to put his 
sacrilegious hand through the dust that lies on antique time, 
through the sanctity of prescription and time-honoured usage, 
through ' mountainous error ' ' too highly heaped for truth to 
overpeer/ in order to make this point in his scientific table. 
And he wishes to blazon it a little. He will pin up this old 
exploded hero — this legacy of barbaric ages, to the ages of 
human advancement — in all his actualities, in all the heroic 
splendours of his original, without ' diminishing one dowle 
that 's in his plume.' 

But this retrospect has not yet reached its limit. It is not 
enough to go back, in the unravelling of this business, to the 
full-grown hero on the field of victory. f For that which, in 
speculative philosophy, corresponds to the cause in practical 
philosophy becomes the rule ;' and it is the Cure of the Common 



376 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

Weal, which the poet is proposing, and having determined 
to proceed specially against Caius Marcius, or against him 
first, he undertakes now to ' delve him to the root.' We are 
already on the battle field; but before ever a stroke is struck 
there, before he will attempt to show us the instinct of the 
warrior in his game, — ' he is a lion that I am proud to hunt/ 
— when all is ready and just as the hunt is going to begin, he 
steals softly back to Home; he unlocks the hero's private 
dwelling, he lays open to us the secrets of that domestic 
hearth, the secrets of that nursery in which his hero had had 
his training ; he shows us the breasts from which he drew that 
martial fire; he produces the woman alive who sent him to 
that field.* In that exquisite relief which the natural graces of 
youth and womanhood provide for it, in the young, gentle, 
feminine wife,' desolate in her husband's absence, starting at the 
rumour of news from the camp, and driving back from her 
appalled conception, the images which her mother-in-law's fear- 
ful speech suggests to her, — in that so beautiful relief, comes 
out the picture of the Eoman matron, the woman in whom the 
martial instincts have been educated and the gentler ones 
repressed, by the common sentiments of her age and nation, 
the woman in whom the common standard of virtue, the conven- 
tional virtue of her time, has annihilated the wife and the mother. 

Virgilia. Had he died in the business, madam, what then 1 
Volumnia. Then his good report should have been my son, / therein 
would have found issue. 

It is the multiplied force of a common instinct in the nation, 
it is the pride of conquest in a whole people, erected into the 
place of virtue and usurping all its sanctity, which has entered 
this woman's nature and reformed its yielding principles. It 
is the Martial Spirit that has subdued her, for she is virtuous 
and religious. It is her people's god to whom she has borne 
her son, and in his temple she has reared him. 

But the poet is not satisfied with all this. It is not enough 

* Act 1, Scene 3. An apartment in the martial chieftain's house ; two 
women, 'on two low stools, sewing? 'There is where your throne begins, 
whatever it be.' 



POLITICAL RETROSPECT. 377 

to introduce us to the hero's mother and permit us to listen to 
her confidential account of his birth and training. He will 
produce the little Coriolanus himself — Coriolanus in germ — he 
will show us the rudiments of those instincts, which his unscien- 
tific education has stimulated into such monstrous f o'ergrowth' 
(but not enlightened), so that the hero on the battle-field who 
is winning there the oaken crown, which he will transmit if he 
can to his posterity, is only, after all, a boy overgrown, — a boy 
with his boyishness unnaturally prolonged by his culture, — the 
impersonation of the childishness of a childish time, — the 
crowned impersonation of the instinct which is SOVEREIGN in 
an age of instinct. He shows us the drum and the sword in 
the nursery, and the boy who would rather look at the mili- 
tary parade than his schoolmaster; — he shows us the little 
viperous egg of a hero torturing and tearing the butterfly, 
with his f confirmed countenance, in one of his father's moods.' 

Surely we have reached ' the grub ' at last, ' the creeping 
thing ' that will have one day imperial armies in its wings. 
And we return from this little excursion to the field again, in 
time for the battle; and when we see the tiger in the man let 
loose there, and the boy's father comes out in one of his own 
moods, that we may note it the better; we begin to observe 
where we are in the human history, and what age of the Ad- 
vancement of Learning it is that this poet is driving at so 
stedfastly, and trying to get dated; and whether it is indeed 
one from which the advancing ages of Learning can accept 
the bourne of the human wisdom, the limit of that advance. 

' And to speak truly [and that after all is the best way of 
speaking] Antiquitas seculi juventus mundi.' 

'Those times are the ancient times, when the world is an- 
cient and not those we account ancient by a computation back- 
ward from ourselves! — Advancement of Learning. But that 
was put down in a book in which we have only general state- 
ments, very wise indeed, and both new and true, most exactly 
true, but not ready for practice, as the author stops to tell us, 
and it is practice he is aiming at. That is from a book in 
which we have only ' the husks and shells of sciences, all the 



378 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

kernel being forced out/ as the author informs us, ' by the torture 
and press of the method.' But it was a method which saved 
them, notwithstanding. This is the book that contains the 
' nuts,' and this is the kernel that goes in that particular shell 
or a corner of it, e Antiquitas seculi juventus mundV 

There, on the spot, lie shows us the process by which a king, 
— an historic king, — is made. He detects and brings out 
and blazons, the moment in which the inequality of fortune 
begins, in the division of the spoils of victory. His hero is 
not, as he takes pains to tell us, covetous, — unless it be a sin to 
covet honour, if it be, he is the most offending soul alive; — 
it is because he is not mercenary, that his soldiers will enrich 
him. The poet shows us where the throne begins, and the 
machinery of that engine which the earth shrinks from when 
it moves. On his stage, it is the moment in which the soldiers 
raise their victorious leader from his feet, and carry him in 
triumph above them. We are there at the ceremony, for this 
is selected, illuminated history; this, too, is what he calls 
4 visible history,' but amid all those martial acclamations and 
plaudits, the philosopher contrives to get in a word. 

' He that has effected bis good will, has o'ertaken my act.' 

From the field he tracks his hero to the chair of state. First 
we have the news of the victory in the city, and its effect: — 

' I'll report it 
Where senators shall mingle tears with smiles ; 
Where great patricians shall attend, and shrug ; 
I' the end admire ; where ladies shall be frighted, 
And, gladly quaked, hear more ; where the dull tribunes, 
Tbat, with the fusty plebeians, hate thine honours, 
Shall say against their hearts, We thank the gods 
Our Rome hath such a soldier.' 

Then we have the hero's return — the conqueror's recep- 
tion ; first in the city whose battle he has won, and afterwards 
his reception in the city he has conquered. Here is the 
latter : — 

' Your native town you entered like a post, 
And had no welcomes home ; but he returns, 



POLITICAL RETROSPECT. 379 

Splitting the air with noises. 

And patient fools, 
Whose children he hath slain, their base throats tear 
With giving him glory.' 

' A goodly city is this Antium ! City, 
'T is 1 that made thy widows ; many an heir 
Of these fair edifices, fore my wars 
Have J heard groan and droop. Then know me not, 
Lest that thy wives with spits, and boys with stones, 
In puny battle slay me.' [ — know me not — lest — 
' Let us kill him, and we will have com at our own price.'] 

But the Poet does not forget that it is the proof of the 
military virtue, as well as the history of the military power, 
that he has undertaken ; ' the touch of its nobility,' as he him- 
self words it. He is trying it by his own exact scientific 
standard ; he is putting the test to it which the new philosophy, 
which is the philosophy of nature, authorises. 

For, in truth, this philosopher, this civilian, is a little jealous 
of this simple virtue of valour, which he finds in his time, as 
in the barbaric ages, still in such esteem, as ' the chiefest 
virtue, and that which most dignifies the haver.' He is of 
opinion, that there may be some other profession, beside that 
of the sword, worth an honest man's attention; that, if the 
world were more enlightened, there would be another kind of 
glory, that would make 'the garland of war' shrivel. He 
thinks that Jupiter, and not Mars, should reign supreme : that 
there is another kind of distinction and leadership, better 
worth the public esteem, better deserving the popular gratitude 
and reverence. 

And when he has once taken an analysis of this kind in 
hand, he is not going to permit any scruples of delicacy to im- 
pair the operation. He will invade that graceful modesty in 
the hero, who shrinks from hearing his exploits narrated. He 
will analyse that blush, and show us chemically what its hue 
is made of. He will bring out those retiring honours from the 
haze and mist which the vague, unanalytic, popular notions, 
have gathered about them. Tucked up in scarlet, braided 
with gold, under its forest of feathers, through all its pomp 



380 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

and blazonry, through all its drums, and trumpets, and cla- 
rions, undaunted by the popular cry, undaunted by that so 
potent word of ' patriotism' which guards it from invasion, he 
will search it out. 

For this purpose he will go a little nearer to it than is the 
heroic poet's wont. When the city is wild with the news of 
this great victory, and the streets are swarming at the tidings 
of the hero's approach, he will take his stand with the family 
parti/, and beckon us to a place where we can listen to what is 
going on there, though the heroics and the blank verse must 
halt for it. 

The glee and fluster might appear to a cool spectator a little 
undignified; but then we are understood to be, like Menenius, 
old friends of the family, and too much carried away with the 
excitement of the moment to be very critical. 

Volumnia. Honourable Menenius, my boy, Marcius, approaches. For 
the love of Juno, let 's go. 

Men. Ha ! Marcius coming home ! 

Vol. Ay, worthy Menenius, and with most prosperous approbation. 

Men. Take my cap, Jupiter, and I thank thee. Hoo ! Marcius coming 
home ? 

Two Ladies. Nay, 't is true. 

Vol. Look ! Here 's a letter from him ; the state hath another, his 
wife another, and I think there 's one at home for you. 

Men. I will make my very house reel to night : — A letter for me ? 

The Wife. Yes, certainly, there 's a letter for you ; I saw it. 

Men. A letter for me ! It gives me an estate of seven years' health ; 
in which time I will make a lip at the physician ... Is he not wounded ? 
He was wont to come home wounded. 

The Wife. Oh, no, no, no ! 

The Mother. Oh, he is wounded. I thank the gods for 't. 

Men. So do I, too, if it be not too much : — Brings 'a victory in his 
pocket : The wounds become him. 

Vol. On 's brow, Menenius : he comes the third time home with the 
oaken garland. 

Men. ... Is the senate possessed of this ! 

Vol. Good ladies, let's go ! Yes, yes, yes : the senate has letters from 
the general, wherein he gives my son the whole name of the war. 

Valeria. In truth, there 's wondrous things spoke of him. 

Men. Wondrous, ay, I warrant you . . . 

Vir. The gods grant them true ! 

Vol. True 1 Pow wow ! 



POLITICAL RETROSPECT. 38 1 

Men. True ? I '11 be sworn they are true. Where 's he wounded 1 
[To the Tribunes, who come forward.] Marcius is coming home : he 
has — more cause to be — proud. — Where is he wounded 1 

Vol. F the shoulder, and i' the left arm : There will be large cicatrices 
to shew the people, when he shall stand for his place. He received in 
the repulse of Tarquin seven hurts i' the body. 

Men. One in the neck, and two in the thigh, — there 's nine that i" 
know. 

Vol. He had, before this last expedition, twenty-Jive wounds upon 
him. 

Men. Now it 's twenty-seven :* every gash was an enemy's grave. 

But now we come to the blank verse again ; for at this 
moment the shout that announces the hero's entrance is heard; 
and, mingling with it, the martial tones of victory. 

' A shout and flourish? 
Hark ! the trumpets ! 

Vol. These are the ushers of Marcius : before him 
He carries noise ; behind him he leaves tears. 
Death, that dark spirit, in 's nervy arm doth lie ; 
Which being advanced, declines, and then men die. 

Then comes the imposing military pageant. A sennet. 
Trumpets sound, and enter the hero, 'crowned' with his oaken 
garland, sustained by the generals on either hand, with the 
victorious soldiers, and a herald proclaiming before him his 
victory. 

Herald. Know, Rome, that all alone Marcius did fight 
Within Corioli's gates : where he hath won 
With fame, a name to Caius Marcius ; these 
In honour follows Coriolanus : 
Welcome to Rome, renowned Coriolanus ! 

But while Eome is listening to this great story, and the 
people are shouting his name, the demi-god catches sight of 
his mother and of his wife; and full of private duty and af- 
fection, he forgets his state, his garland stoops, the conqueror 
is on his knee, in filial submission. The woman had said 
truly, ' my boy Marcius is coming home.' And when he greets 

* Of course there is no satire intended here at all. This is a Poet 
who does not know what he is about. 



382 THE CURE OF THE COMMON- WEAL. 

the weeping Virgilia, who cannot speak but with her tears, 
these are the words with which he measures that private joy — 

'Would'st thou have laughed, had I come coffin'd home, 
That weep'st to see me triumph 1 Ah, my dear, 
Such eyes the widows in Corioli wear, 
And mothers that lack sons' 

No; these are the Poet's words, rather — ' such eyes.' 

Such eyes. It was the Poet who could look through the 
barriers — those hitherto impervious barriers of an enemy's 
town, and see in it, at that moment, eyes as beautiful — eyes 
that had been ' dove's eyes,' too, to those who had loved them, 
wet with other tears, — mothers that loved their sons, and 
' lacked them'; it was the Poet to whose human sense those hard 
hostile walls dissolved and cleared away, till he could see the 
Volscian wives clasping their loves, as they ' came coffined 
home'; it was the Poet who dared to stain the joy and triumph 
of that fond meeting, the glory and pride of that triumphal 
entry, with those human thoughts; it was he who heard above 
the roll of the drum, and the swell of the clarions and trumpets, 
and the shout of the rejoicing multitude above the herald's 
voice — the groans of mortal anguish in the field, the cries of 
human sorrow in the city, the shrieks of mothers that lacked 
sons, the greetings of wives whose loves ' came coffined home.' 
And he does not mind aggravating the intense selfishness, and 
narrowness, and stolidity of these private passions and affections 
of the individual to a truly unnatural and diabolical intensity, 
by charging on poor Volumnia and Marcius his own reminis- 
cences; as if they could have dared to heighten their joy at 
that moment by counting its cost — as if they could have 
looked in the face — as if they could have comprehended, in 
its actual dimensions, the theme of their vulgar, narrow, un- 
learned exultation. But this is a trick this author is much 
given to, we shall find, when we come to study him carefully. 
He is not scrupulous on such points. He has a tolerable sense 
of the fitness of things, too. His dramatic conscience is as 
nice as another man's; but he is always ready to sin against it, 
when he sees reason. He is much like his own Mr. Slender 
in one respect, 'he will do anything in reason'; and his theory 



POLITICAL RETROSPECT. 383 

of the Chief End of Man appears to differ essentially from the 
one which our modern Doctors of ' Art ' propound incidentally 
in their criticisms. It is the mother who cries, when she 
catches the swell of the trumpets that announce her son's ap- 
proach — ' These are the ushers of Marcius. Before him he 
carries noise.' It is the Poet who adds, sotto voce, ' behind him 
he leaves tears.' 

' You are three,' says Menenius, after some further pro- 
longation of these private demonstrations, addressing himself 
to the three victorious generals — 

' You are three, 
That Eome should dote on : yet, by the faith of men, 
We have some old crab-trees here at home, that will not 
Be grafted to your relish. Yet welcome, warriors : 
We call a nettle but a nettle ; and 
The faults of fools, hit folly' 

But the herald is driving on the crowd ; and considering 
how very public the occasion is, and how very, very private 
and personal all this chat is, it does appear to have stopped the 
way long enough. Thus hurried, the hero gives hastily a 
hand ' to his wife and mother ' [stage direction], but stops 
to say a word or two more, which has the merit of being at 
least to the Poet's purpose, though the common-weal may 
appear to be lost sight of in the hero's a little; and that de- 
licacy and reserve of manner, that modesty of nature, which 
is the characteristic of this Poet's art, serves here, as elsewhere, 
to disguise the internal continuities of the poetic design. The 
careless eye will not track it in these finer touches. ' Where 
some stretched-mouth rascal ' would have roared you out his 
prescribed moral, ' outscolding Termagant' wuh it, the Poet, 
who is the poet of truth, and who would have such fellows 
( whipped ' out of the sacred places of Art, with a large or 
small cord, as the case may be, is content to bring in his c de- 
licate burdens,' or to keep sight of them, at least, with some 
such reference to them as this — 

' Ere in our own house I do shade my head, 
The good patricians must be visited ; 
From whom I have received not only greetings 
But with them change of honours'— [change.'] 



384 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

That is his visit to the state-house which he is speaking of. It 
is the Capitol which is put down in his plan of the city on his 
way to his own house. ' The state has a letter from him, and 
his wife another; and I think there is one for you, too.' 

Volumnia understands that delicate intimation as to the 
change of honours, and in return, takes occasion to express to 
him, on the spot, her views about the consulship, and the use 
to which the new cicatrices are to be converted. 

Coriolanus replies to this in words that admit, as this Poet's 

words often do, of a double construction; for the Poet is, 

indeed, lurking under all this. He is always present, and he 

often slips in a word for himself, when his characters are busy, 

and thinking of their own parts only. He is very apt to make 

use of occasions for emphasis, to put in one word for his 

speakers, and two for himself. It is irregular, but he does not 

stand much upon precedents; it was the only way he had of 

writing his life then — 

' Know, good mother, 
I had rather be their servant in my way, 
Than sway with them in theirs. 
Cominius. On, to the Capitol.' 
[Flourish Cornets. Exeunt in state, as before. The Tribunes remain.'] 

And when the great pageant has moved on ' in state, as 
before ' — when the shouts of the people, and the triumphal 
swell and din, have died away, this is the manner in which our 
two tribunes look at each other. They know their voices 
would not make so much as a ripple, at that moment, in the 
tide of that great sea of popular ignorance, which it is their 
business to sway, — the tide which is setting all one way then, 
in one of its monstrous swells, and bearing every living thing 
with it, — the tide which is taking the military hero ' On to 
the Capitol.' But though they cannot then oppose it, they 
can note it. And it is thus that they register that popular 
confirmation at home, of the soldier's vote on the field. 

It is a picture of the hero's return, good for all ages in its 
living outline, composed in that ' charactery ' which lays the 
past and future open. It is a picture good for the Koman 



POLITICAL RETROSPECT. 385 

hero's entry ; ' and were now tlie general of our gracious em- 
press, as in good time he may, from Ireland coming, bringing 
rebellion broached on his sword 1 — would it, or would it not, 
suit him? 

It is a picture of the hero's return, good for all ages in its 
main feature, for all the ages, at least of a brutish popular 
ignorance, of a merely instinctive human growth and forma- 
tion ; but it is a picture taken from the life, — caught, — 
detained with the secret of that palette, whose secret none has 
yet found, and the detail is all, not Roman, but, Elizabethan. 
Those ' variable complexions,' that one sees, c smothering the 
stalls, bulks, windows, filling the leads,' and roofs, even to 
the ' ridges,' all agreeing in one expression, are Elizabethan. 
It is an Elizabethan crowd that we have got into, in some 
way, and it is worth noting if it were only for that. There 
goes ' the seld shown flam en, puffing his way to win a vulgar 
station,' here is a ' veiled dame' who lets us see that > war of 
white and damask in her nicely gawded cheeks,' a moment; — ■ 
look at that ' kitchen malkin,' peering over the wall there 
with ' her richest lockram' ' pinned on her reechy neck,' eyeing 
the hero as he passes; and look at this poor baby here, this 
Elizabethan baby, saved, conserved alive, crying himself ' into 
a rapture' while his ' prattling nurse' has ears and eyes for the 
hero only, as ' she chats him.' Look at them all, for every crea- 
ture you see here, from ' the seld shown flamen' to the 'kitchen 
malkin/ belongs soul and body to ' our gracious Empress,' 
and Essex and Raleigh are still winning their garlands of the 
war, — that is when the scene is taken, but not when it was 
put in its place and framed in this composition ; for their game 
was up ere then. England preferred old heroes and their 
claims to new ones. ' I fear there will a worse come in his 
place/ was the cautious instinct. 

Bru. All tongues speak of him, and the bleared sights 
Are spectacled to see him : Your prattling nurse 
Into a rapture lets her baby cry, 
While she chats him : the kitchin malkin pins 
Her richest lockram 'bout her reechy neck. 
Clambering the walls to eye him : stalls, bulks, windows, 
C C 



386 THE CURE OF THE COMMON- WEAL. 

Are smother' d up, leads fill'd, and ridges horsed 

With variable complexions ; all agreeing 

In earnestness to see him: seld-shown flamens 

Bo press among the popular throng, and puff 

To win a vulgar station : our veil'd dames 

Commit the war of white and damask, in 

Their nicely-gawded cheeks to the wanton spoil 

Of Phosbus' burning kisses : such a pother, 

As if that whatsoever god, who leads him, 

Were slyly crept into his human power's, 

And gave him graceful posture. 
Sic. On the sudden, 

I warrant him consul. 
Bru, Then our office may, 

During his power, go sleep. 
Sic. Me cannot temperately transport his honours 
but will 

Lose that he hath toon. 
Cru. In that there's comfort. 

Sic. Doubt not, the commoners, for whom we stand, — 

[While they resolve upon the measures to be taken, which 
we shall note elsewhere, a messenger enters.] 
Bru. What's the matter 1 

Mess. You are sent for to the Capitol. Tis thought, 
That Marcius shall be consul : I have seen 
The dumb men throng to see him, and the blind 
To hear him speak : The matrons flung their gloves, 
Ladies and maids the scarfs and handkerchiefs, 
Upon him as he passed : the nobles bended, 
As to Jove's statue ; and the commons made 
A shower, and thunder, with their caps, and shouts : 
I never saw the like. 
Bru. Let's to the Capitol ; 

And carry with us ears and eyes for the time, 
But hearts for the event. 

[And let us to the Capitol also, and hear the civic claim of 
the oaken garland, the military claim to dispose of the com- 
mon-weal, as set forth by one who is himself a general ' com- 
mander-in-chieP of Rome's armies, and see whether or no the 
Poet's own doubtful cheer on the battle-field has any echo in 
this place.] 

Com. It is held, 

That valour is the chief est virtue, and 
Most dignifies the haver : IP IT BE, 



POLITICAL RETROSPECT. 387 

The man I speak of cannot in the world 
Be singly counterpois'd. 

[If it be ? And he goes on to tell a story which fits, in all its 

points, a great hero, a true chieftain, brave as heroes of old 

romance, who lived when this was written, concluding thus — "J 

Com. He stopped the fliers; 

And, by his rare example, made the coward 
Turn terror into sport : as waves before 
A vessel under sail, so men obey'd, 
And fell below his stem : his sword, (death's stamp.) 
Where it did mark, it took ; from face to foot 
He was a thing of blood, whose every motion 
Y/as timed with dying cries : alone he enter'd 
The mortal gate o'the city, which he painted 
With shunless destiny, aidless came off, 
And with a sudden re-enforcement struck 
Corioli, like a planet : now, all's his : 
When by and by the din of war 'gan pierce 
His ready sense : then straight his doubled spirit 
Re-quicken' d what in flesh was fatigate, 
And to the battle came he ; where he did 
Run reeking o'er the lives of men, as if 
'T ' xoere a perpetual spoil : and till we calVd 
Both field and city ours, he never stood 
To ease his breast with panting. 
Men. Wobthy man ! 

First Sen. He cannot but with measure fit the honours 
Which we devise him. 

[One more quality, however, his pleader insists on, as addi- 
tional proof of this i fitness,' for though it is a negative one, 
its opposite had not been reckoned among the kingly virtues, 
and the poet takes some pains to bring that opposite quality 
into relief, throughout, by this negative.] 

Com. Our spoils he kicked at ; 

And look'd upon things precious, as they were 
The common muck 0' the world. 
Men. He's eight noble ; 

Let him be call' d for. 
First Sen. Call for Coriolanus. 

Off. He doth appear. 

At the opening of this scene, two officers appeared on the 
stage, ' laying cushions? for this, is one of those specimens of 

CC 2 



388 THE CURE OF THE COMMON WEAL. 

the new method of investigation applied to the noblest subjects, 
' which represents, as it were, to the eye, the whole order of the 
invention,' and into the Capitol stalks now the casque, for this 
is that ' step from the casque to the cushion' which the Poet 
is considering in the abstract; but it does not suit his purpose 
to treat of it in these abstract terms merely, because i reason 
cannot be so sensible.' This, too, is one of those grand historic 
moments which this new, select, prepared history must repre- 
sent to the eye in all its momentous historic splendour, for 
this is the kind of popular instruction which reproduces the 
past, which represents the historic event, not in perspective, 
but as present. And this is the 'business,' and this is the play 
in which we are told ( action is eloquence, and the eyes of the 
ignorant more learned than the ears.' 

The seats of state are prepared for him. ' Call Coriolanus,' 
is the senate's word. The conqueror's step is heard. ' He 
does appear/ 

Men. The senate, Coriolanus, are~well pleased 

To make thee consul. 
Cor. I do owe them still 

My life, and services. 
Men. It then remains, 

That you do speak to the people. 
Cor. I do beseech you, 

Let one overleap that custom. 
Sic. Sir, the people 

Must have their voices ; neither will they bate 

One jot of their ceremony. 
Men.'l Put them not to't, : — [his friendly adviser says.] 

Pray you, go fit you to the custom ; and 

Take to you, as your predecessors have, 

Your honour, with your form. 
Cor. It is a part 

That I shall blush in acting, and might well 

Be taken from the people. 
Bru. Mark you that ! 

Cor. To brag unto them, — Thus I did, and thus ; — 

Show them the unaching scars which I should hide, 

As if I had received them for the hire 

Of their breath only. 



389 



CHAPTER V. 

THE POPULAR ELECTION. 

' The greater part carries it. 
If he would but incline to the people, 
There never was a Avorthier man.' 

A ND yet, after all, that is what he wants for them, and must 
have or he is nothing; for as the Poet tells us elsewhere, 
c our monarchs and our outstretched heroes are but the beg- 
gar's shadows.' The difficulty is, that he wishes to take his 
'hire' in some more quiet way, without being rudely reminded 
of the nature of the transaction. 

But the Poet's toils are about him. The man of science has 
caught the hero, the king in germ; the dragon wings are 
not yet spread. He wishes to exhibit the embryo monarch in 
this particular stage of his development, and the scientific pro- 
cess proceeds with as little regard to the victim's wishes, as if he 
were indeed that humble product of nature to which the Poet 
likens him. ' There's a differency between a grub and a but- 
terfly; yet your butterfly was a grub.' Just on that step 
between f the casque and the cushion,' the philosopher arrests 
him. 

For this history denotes, as we have seen, a foregone conclu- 
sion. The scholar has privately anatomized in his study the 
dragon's wings, and this theatrical synthesis is designed to be 
an instructive one. He wishes to show, in a palpable form, 
what is and what is not, essential to the mechanism of that 
greatness which, though it presents itself to the eye in the con- 
temptible physique, and moral infirmity and pettiness of the 
human individual, is yet clothed with powers so monstrous, so 
real, so terrific, that all men are afflicted with them; — this 
thing in which ' the conditions of a man are so altered/ this 



390 THE CURE OP THE COMMON-WEAL 

thing which • has grown from man to dragon, which is more 
than a creeping thing/ He will show that after all it is noth- 
ing in the world but the popular power itself, the power 
of the people instinctively, unscientifically and unartistically 
exercised. 

The Poet has analysed that so potent name by which men 
call it, and he will show upon his stage, by that same method 
which his followers have made familiar to us, in other depart- 
ments of investigation, the elements of its power. He will let 
us see how it was those despised ' mechanics/ those ' poor citi- 
zens/ with their strong arms and voices, who were throwing 
themselves, — in their enthusiasm, — en-masse into that engine, 
and only asking to be welded in it; that would have made of 
this citizen a thing so terrific. He will show how, after all, it 
was the despised commons who were making of that citizen a 
king, of that soldier a monarch, — who were changing with 
the alchemy of the ' shower and thunder they made with their 
caps and voices/ his oak leaves and acorns, into gold and 
jewels. 

He will show it on the platform of a state, where that 
vote is formally and constitutionally given, and not in a 
state where it is only a virtual and tacit one. He will 
show it in detail. He will cause the multitude to be re- 
presented^ and pass by twos and threes across his stage, 
and compel the haughty chief, the would be ruler, to beg 
of them, individually, their suffrages, and show them his 
claim, — such as it is, the ' 'winching senrs thnt he should 
hide.' 

It is to this Poet's purpose to exhibit that despised element 
in the state, which the popular submission creates, that un- 
noticed element of the common suffrage which looks so smooth 
on its surface, which seems to the haughty chief so little 
worth his notice, when it goes his way and bears him on its 
crest. But the experimenter will undertake to show what it 
is by ruffling it, by instigating this chief to put himself in the 
madness of his private affections, in the frenzy of his pride, 
into open opposition with it. He will show us what it is by 



THE POPULAR ELECTION. 39 1 

playing with it. He will wake it from its unvisited depths, 
and bid his hero strive with it. 

He will show what that popular consent, or the consent of 
' the commons ' amounts to, in the king-making process, by 
omitting it or by ivithdrawing it, before it is too late to with- 
draw it; — according to the now well-known rules of that new 
art of scientific investigation, which was then getting worked 
out and cleared, from this, author's OAvn methods of investiga- 
tion. For it was because this faculty was in him, so unlike 
what it was in others, that he was able to write that science of 
it, by which other men, stepping into his armour, have been 
able to achieve so much. 

He will show how those dragon teeth and claws, that were 
just getting the steel into them, which would have armed that 
single will against the whole, and its weal, crumble for the 
lack of it; he will show us the new-fledged wings, with all 
their fresh gauds, collapsing and dissolving with that popular 
withdrawal. He will continue the process, till there is nothing 
left of all that gorgeous state pageant, which came in with the 
flourish of trumpets and the voice of the herald long and loud, 
and the echoing thunder of the commons, but a poor grub of 
a man, in his native conditions, a private citizen, denied even 
the common privilege of citizenship, — with only his wife and 
his mother and a friend or two, to cling to him, — turned out 
of the city gates, to seek his fortune. 

But that is the moment in which the Poet ventures to bring 
out a little more fully, in the form of positive statement, that 
latent affirmation, that definition of the true nobility which 
underlies all the play and glistens through it in many a fine, 
but hitherto, unnoticed point; that affirmation which all these 
negatives conclude in, that latent idea of the true personal 
greatness and its essential relation to the common-weal and the 
state, which is the predominant idea of the play, which shapes 
all the criticism and points all the satire of it. It is there that 
the true hero speaks out for a moment from the lips of that old 
military heroism, of a greatness which does not cease when 
the wings of state drop off from it, of an honour that takes 



392 THE CURE OF THE COMMON- WEAL. 

no stain though all the human voices join to sully it, — the 
dignity that rises and soars and gains the point of immuta- 
bility, when all the world would have it under foot. But 
in that nobility men need training, — scientific training. The 
instinctive, unartistic human growth, or the empirical un- 
scientific arts of culture, give but a vulgar counterfeit of it, or 
at best a poor, sickly, distorted, convulsive, unsatisfactory 
type of it, for ' being gentle, wounded/ — (and it is gentility 
and nobility and the true aristocracy that we speak of here,) 
— 'craves a noble cunning ;' so the old military chieftain 
tells us. It is a cunning which his author does not put him 
upon practising personally. Practically he represents another 
school of heroes. It is the word of that higher heroism in 
which he was himself wanting, it is the criticism on his own 
part, it is the affirmation which all this grand historic negative 
is always pointing to, which the author borrows his lips to 
utter. 

The result in this case, the overthrow of the military hero 
on his way to the chair of state, is occasioned by the premature 
arrogance to which his passionate nature impels him. For his 
fiery disposition refuses to obey the decision of his will, and 
overleaps in its passion, all the barriers of that policy which his 
calmer moments had prescribed. The result is occasioned by 
his open display of his contempt for the people, before he had 
as yet mastered the organizations which would make that 
display, in an unenlightened age, perhaps, a safe one. 

This point of time is much insisted on, and emphasized. 

' Let them pull all about mine ears,' cries the hero, as he 
enters his own house, after his first encounter with the multi- 
tude in their wrath. 

' Let them pull all about mine ears, present me 
Death on the wheel, or at wild horses' heels, 
Or pile ten hills on the Tarpeian rock 
That the precipitation might down stretch 
Below the beam of sight, yet will I still — 
Be THUS to them.'' 

[For that is the sublime conclusion of these heroics.] 



THE POPULAR ELECTION - . 393 

' You do the nobler? responds the Coryphaeus of that chorus 
of patricians who accompany him home, and who ought, of 
course, to be judges of nobility. But there is another appro- 
bation wanted. Volumnia is there; but she listens in silence. 
f I muse/ he continues — 

' I muse my mother 
Does not approve me further — who was wont 
To call them woollen vassals, things created 
To buy and sell with groats ; to show bare heads 
In congregations, to yawn, be still, and wonder, 
When one but of my ordinance stood up 
To speak of peace or war. I talk of you [to Volumnia. 
Why did you wish me milder 1 Would you have me 
False to my nature 1 [Softly] Rather say I play 
The man I am. 

Vol. O sir, sir, sir, 

I would have had you put your potver well on, 
Ere you had worn it out. 

Cor. Let go. 

Vol. Lesser had been 

The thwarting of your dispositions, if 
You bad not shown them how you were disposed 
Ere they lacked power to cross you. 

Cor. Let them hang ! ■ \ 

Vol. Ay, and burn too ! 

For that was the 'disposition' which these Commons, if 
they had waited but a little longer, might have ' lacked power 
to cross. 1 That was the disposition they had thwarted. 

But then it is necessary to our purpose, as it was to the 
author's, to notice that the collision in this case is a forced one. 
It grows by plot. The people are put up to it. For there are 
men in that commonwealth who are competent to instruct the 
Commons in the doctrine of the common weal, and who are 
carefully and perseveringly applying themselves to that task; 
though they are men who know how to bide their time, and 
they will wait till the soaring insolence of the hero is brought 
into open collision with that enlightened popular will. 

They will wait till the military hero's quarrel with the 
commonwealth breaks ^Dut anew. For they know that it lies 



394 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

in the nature of things, and cannot but occur. The eclat of 
his victory, and the military pride of the nation, films it over 
for a time; but the quarrel is a radical one, and cannot be 
healed. 

For this chief of soldiers, and would-be head and ruler of 
the state knows no commonvjealth. His soul is not large 
enough to admit of that conception. The walls of ignorance, 
that he shuts himself up in, darken and narrow his world to 
the sphere of his own microcosm, — and, therefore, there is a 
natural war between the world and him. The state of uni- 
versal subjection, on the part of others, to his single exclusive 
passions and affections, the state in which the whole is sacrificed 
to the part, is the only state that will satisfy him. That is the 
peace he is disposed to conquer; that is the consummation 
with which he would stay, that is his notion of state. When 
that consummation is attained, or when such an approximation 
to it as he judges to be within his reach, is attained, then, 
and not till then, he is for conservation; — revolution then is sin; 
but, till then he will have change and overturning — he will 
fill the earth with rapine, and fire, and slaughter. But this is 
just the peace and war principle, which this man, who pro- 
poses a durable and solid peace, and the true state, a state 
constructed with reference to true definitions and axioms, — 
this is the peace and war principle which the man of science, 
on scientific grounds, objects to. ' He likes nor peace nor war' 
on those terms. The conclusions he has framed from those 
solid premises which he finds in the nature of things, makes 
him the leader of the opposition in both cases. In one way 
or another he will make war on that peace ; he will kindle the 
revolutionary fires against that conservation. In one way or 
another, in one age or another, he will silence that war with 
all its pomp and circumstance, with all the din of its fifes, and 
drums, and trumpets. He will make over to the ignominy of 
ignorant and barbaric ages, — ' for we call a nettle but a nettle,' 
he will turn into a forgotten pageant of the rude, early, in- 
stinctive ages, the yet brutal ages of an undeveloped humanity, 
that triumphant reception at home, of the Conqueror of 



THE POPULAR ELECTION. 395 

Foreign States. He will undermine, in all the states, the 
ethics and religion of brute force, till men shall grow sick, at 
last, of the old, rusty, bygone trumpery of its insignia, and 
say, ' Take away those baubles/ 

But the hero that we deal with here, is but the pure nega- 
tion of that heroism which his author conceives of, aspires to, 
and will have, historical, which he defines as the pattern of 
man's nature in all men. This one knows no common- wealth ; 
the wealth that is wealth in his eyes, is all his own ; the weal 
that he conceives of, is the weal that is warm at his own heart 
only. At best he can go out of his particular only as far as 
the limits of his own hearthstone, or the limits of his clique 
or caste. And in his selfish passion, when that demands it, he 
will sacrifice the nearest to him. As to the Commons, they 
are ' but things to buy and sell with groats,' a herd, a mass, 
a machine, to be informed with his single will, to be subordi- 
nated to his single wishes; in peace enduring the gnawings of 
hunger, that the garners their toil has filled may overflow for 
him, — enduring the badges of a degradation which blots out 
the essential humanity in them, to feed his pride ; — in war 
offered up in droves, to win the garland of the war for him. 
That is the old hero's commonwealth. His small brain, his 
brutish head, could conceive no other. The ages in which he 
ruled the world with his instincts, with his fox-like cunning, 
with his wolfish fury, with his dog-like ravening, — those brute 
ages could know no other. 

But it is the sturdy European race that the hero has to deal 
with here; and though, in the moment of victory, it is ready 
always to chain itself to the conqueror's car, and, in the exul- 
tation of conquest, and love for the conqueror, fastens on 
itself, with joy, the fetters of ages, this quarrel is always 
breaking out in it anew : it does not like being governed with 
the edge of the sword; — it is not fond of martial law as a per- 
manent institution. 

Two very sagacious tribunes these old Bomans happen to 
have on hand in this emergency : birds considerably too old to 
be caught with this chaff of victory and military virtue, which 



396 THE CURE OF THE COMMON WEAL. 

puts the populace into such a frenzy, and very learnedly they 
talk on this subject, with a slight tendency to anachronisms in 
their mode of expression, in language which sounds a little, 
at times, as if they might have had access to some more recent 
documents, than the archives of mythical Rome could just 
then furnish to them. 

But the reader should judge for himself of the correctness 
of this criticism. 

Refusing to join in the military procession on its way to the 
Capitol, and stopping in the street for a little conference on 
the subject, when it has gone by, after that vivid complaint of 
the universal prostration to the military hero already quoted, 
the conference proceeds thus : — 

JSic. On the sudden, 

I warrant him consul. 
Bru. Then our~office may, 

During his poiver, go sleep. 
Sic. He cannot temperately transport his honours 

From where he should begin, and end ; but will 

Lose those that he hath won. 
Bru. In that there's comfort. 
Sic. Doubt not, the commoners, for whom we stand. 

But they, upon their ancient malice, will 

Forget, with the least cause, these his neio honours; 

Which that he'll give them, make as little question 

As he is proud to do't. 
Bru. I heard him swear, 

"Were he to stand for consul, never would he 

Appear i'the market-place, nor on him put 

The napless vesture of humility ; 

Nor, showing (as the manner is) his wounds 

To the people, beg their stinking breaths. 
Sic. 'Tis right. 

Bru. It was his word : 0, he would miss it, rather 

Than carry it, but by the suit o'the gentry to him, 

And the desire of the nobles. 
Sic. I vnsh no better, 

Than have him hold that purpose, and to put it 

In execution. 
Bru. 'Tis most like he will. 

Sic. It shall be to him then, as our good wills 

A sure destruction. 



THE POPULAR ELECTION. 397 

Bru. So it must fall out 

To him, or our authorities. For an end, 
We must suggest the people, in what hatred 
He still hath held them ; that to his power he would 
Have made them mules, silenced their pleaders, and 
Dispropertied their freedoms : [ — note the expression — ] 

holding them, 
In human action and capacity, 
Of no more soul nor fitness for the world 
Than Camels in their war ; who have their provand 
Only for bearing burdens, and sore blows 
For sinking under them. 

Sic. This as you say, suggested 

At some time, when his soaring insolence 
Shall teach the people (which time shall not want) 
If he be put upon't ; and that's as easy 
As to set dogs on sheep ; will he his fire 
to kindle their dry stubble ; and their blaze 
Shall darken him for ever. 

[There is a history in all men's lives, 

Figuring the nature of the times deceased, 

The which observed a man may prophesy, 

With a near aim of the main chance of things, 

As yet not come to life, which in their seeds 

And weak beginnings, lie intreasured : 

Such things become the hatch andbrood of time. — Henry IV.] 

Coriolanus, elected by the Senate to the consulship, proposes, 
in his arrogance, as we have already seen, to dispense with the 
usual form, which he understands to be a form merely, of 
asking the consent of the people, and exhibiting to them his 
claim to their suffrages. The tribunes have sternly withstood 
this proposition, and will hear of f no jot' of encroachment 
upon the dignity and state of the Commons. After the flourish 
with which the election in the Senate Chamber concludes, and 
the withdrawal of the Senate, again they stop to discuss, con- 
fidentially, ' the situation.' 

Bru. You see how he intends to use the people. 

Sic. May they perceive his intent ; he will require them 

As if he did contemn what they requested 

Should be in their power to give. 



39^ THE CUKE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

Bru. Come, we'll inform them 

Of our proceedings here : on the market-place 
I know they do attend us. 

And to the market-place we go; for it is there that the 
people are collecting in throngs; no bats or clubs in their 
hands now, but still full of their passion of gratitude and 
admiration for the hero's patriotic achievements, against the 
common foe; and, tinder the influence of that sentiment, 
wrought to its highest pitch by that action and reaction which 
is the incident of the common sentiment in ' the greater con- 
gregations,' or ' extensive wholes,' eager to sanction with their 
1 approbation/ the appointment of the Senate, though the 
graver sort appear to be, even then, haunted with some un- 
pleasant reminiscences, and not without an occasional mis- 
giving as to the wisdom of the proceeding. There is a little 
tone of the former meeting lurking here still. 

First Cit. Once, if he do require our voices, we ought not to deny 
him. 

Second Cit. We may, Sir, if we will. 

Third Cit. We have power in ourselves to do it, but it is a power 
that we have no power to do. Ingratitude is monstrous : and for the 
multitude to be ungrateful, were to make a monster of the multitude, — 

[There are scientific points here. This term ' monstrosity ' is 
one of the radical terms in the science of nature; but, like 
many others, it is used in the popular sense, while the sweep 
and exactitude of the scientific definition, or ( form ' is intro- 
duced into it.] 

-^- of the which, we, being members, should bring ourselves to be mon- 
strous members. 

First Cit. And to make us no better thought of, a little help will 
serve : for once, when we stood up about the corn, he himself stuck 
not to call us the m«?i?/-headed multitude. 

Third Cit. We have been called so of many ; not that our heads are 
some brown, some black, some auburn, some bald, but that our wits 
are so diversely coloured : and truly I think, if all our wits were to issue 
out of one skull, they would fly east, west, north, south ; and their 
consent of one direct way should be at once to all the points o'the 
compass. 



THE POPULAR ELECTION. 399 

[An enigma; but the sphinx could propound no better one. 
Truly this man has had good teaching. He knows how to 
translate the old priestly Etruscan into the vernacular.] 

Second Git. Think you so 1 Which way, do you judge, my wit 
would fly 1 

Third Cit. Nay, your wit will not so soon out as another man's will, 
'tis strongly wedged up in a block-head : but if it were at liberty . . . 

Second Cit. You are never without your tricks : — . . . 

Third Cit. Are you all resolved to give your voices ? But that's no 
matter. The greater part carries it. I say, if he would incline to the 
people, there was never a worthier man. 

[Enter Coriolanus and Menenius.] 

Here he comes, and in the gown of humility ; mark his behaviour. 
"We are not to stay all together, but to come by him where he stands, 
by ones, by twos, and by threes. He's to make his requests by parti- 
cidars : wherein every one of us has a single honour, in giving him our 
own voices with our own tongues : therefoix follow me, and I'll direct 

YOU HOW YOU SHALL GO BY HIM. 

[The voice of the true leader is lurking here, and all through 
these scenes the ' double ' meanings are thickly sown.] 

All. Content, content ! 

Men. O Sir, you are not right : have you not known 

The worthiest men have done it ? 
Cor. What must I say 1 — 

I pray, Sir 1 — Plague upon't ! I cannot bring 

My tongue to such a pace : Look, Sir, my wounds ; — 

I got them in my country's service, when 

Some certain of your brethren roar'd, and ran 

From the noise of our own drums. 
Men. me, the gods ! 

You must not speak of that ; you must desire them 

To think upon you. 
Co?\ Think upon me? Bang 'em ! 

I would they would forget me, like the virtues 

Which our divines lose by them. 
Men. You'll mar all; 

I'll leave you : Pray you, speak to them, I pray you, 

In wholesome manner. 

[And now, instead of being thronged with a mob of citi- 
zens — instructed how they are to go by him with the honor of 
their single voices they enter c by twos ' and ' threes.'] 



400 THE CURE OF THE COMMON WEAL. 

[Enter two Citizens.] 

Cor. Hid them wash their faces, 

And keep their teeth clean. — So, here comes a brace, 
You know the cause, Sir, of my standing here. 
First Cit. We do, Sir ; tell us what hath brought you to% 

Cor. Mine own desert. — [The would-be consul answers.] 
Second Cit. Your own desert 1 

Cor. Ay, not 

Mine own desire. 

[His own desert has brought him to the consulship ; his own 
desire would have omitted the conciliation of the people, and 
the deference to their will, that with all his desert somehow he 
seems to find expected from him.] 

First Cit. How ! not your own desire ! 

Cor. No, Sir. 

'Twas never my desire yet, 
To trouble the poor vjith begging. 

He desires what the poor have to give him however ; but he 
desires to take it, without begging. But it is the heart of the 
true hero that speaks in earnest through that mockery, and the 
reference is to a state of things towards which the whole criti- 
cism of the play is steadfastly pointed, a state in which sove- 
reigns were reluctantly compelled to beg from the poor, what 
they would rather have taken without their leave, or, at least, 
a state in which the form of this begging was still maintained, 
though there lacked but little to make it a form only, a state 
of things in which a country gentleman might be called on to 
sell 'his brass pans' without being supplied, on the part of the 
State, with what might appear, to him, any respectable reason 
for it, putting his life in peril, and coming off, with a hair's- 
breadth escape, of all his future usefulness, if he were bold 
enough to question the proceeding; a state of things in which 
a poor law-reader might feel himself called upon to buy a 
gown for a lady, whose gowns were none of the cheapest, at a 
time when the state of his finances might render it extremely 
inconvenient to do so. 

But to return to the Roman citizen, for the play is written 
by one who knows that the human nature is what it is in all 



THE POPULAR ELECTION. 40 1 

ages, or, at least, until it is improved with better arts of culture 
than the world has yet tried on it. 

First Cit. You must think, if we give you anything, 

We hope to gain by you. 
Cor. Well then, I pray, your price o'thb consulship 1 

First Cit. The price is, Sir, to ask it kindly. 
Cor. Kindly 1 

Sir, I pray let me ha't : I have wounds to show you, 

Which shall be yours in private. — Your good voice, Sir ; 

What say you ? 
Second Cit. You shall have it, worthy Sir. 

Cor. A match, Sir : 

There is in all two worthy voices begg'd : — 

I have your alms ; adieu. 
First Cit. But this is something odd. 

Second Cit. An 'twere to give again, — But 'tis no matter. 

[Exeunt two Citizens.] 

[Enter two other Citizens.] 

Cor. Pray you now, if it may stand with the tune of your voices, 
that I may be consul, I have here the customary gown. 

Third Cit. You have deserved nobly of your country, and you have 
not deserved nobly. 

Cor. Your enigma 1 

Third Cit. You have been a scourge to her enemies, you have been a 
rod to her friends ; you have not indeed, loved the common people. 

Cor. You should account me the more virtuous, that I have not been 
common in my love. I will, Sir, flatter my sworn brother the people, 
to earn a dearer estimation of them ; 'tis a condition they account 
gentle : and since the wisdom of their choice is rather to have my 
hat than my heart, I will practise the insinuating nod, and be off to 
them most counterfeitly ; that is, Sir, I will counterfeit the bewitchment 
of some popular man, and give it bountifully to the desirers. Therefore, 
beseech you, I may be consul. 

Fourth Cit. We hope to find you our friend; and therefore give you 
our voices heartily. 

Third Cit. You have received many wounds for your country. 

Cor. I will not seal your knowledge with showing them. I will make 
much of your voices, and so trouble you no further. 

Both Cit. The gods give you joy, Sir, heartily ! [Exeunt. 

Cor. Most sweet voices ! — 

Better it is to die, better to starve, 

. . Bather than fool it so, 
Let the high office and the honour go 
D D 



402 THE CURE OF THE COMMON WEAL. 

To one that would do thus. — I am half through ; 
The one part suffered, the other will I do. 

[Enter three other Citizens.'] 

Here come more voices, — 
Your voices : for your voices 1 have fought : 
Watch' 'd for your voices ; for your voices, bear 
Of wounds two dozen odd ; battles thrice six, 
I have seen and heard of; for your voices, 
Done many things, some less, some more : your voices : 
Indeed, I would be consul. 
Fifth Cit. He has done nobly, and cannot go without any honest man's 
voice. 

Sixth Cit. Therefore let him be consul : The gods give him joy, and 
make him good friend to the people. 

All. Amen, Amen. 

God save thee, noble consul ! [Exeunt Citizens!] 

Cor. Woethy voices ! 

[Re-enter Menenius, with the tribunes Brutus, and Sicinius.] 

Men. You have stood your limitation ; and the tribunes 

Endue you with the people's voice : Remains, 

That in the official marks invested, you 

Anon do meet the senate. 
Cor. Is this done 1 

Sic. The custom of request you have discharged : 

The people do admit you ; and are summon' d 

To meet anon, upon your approbation. 
Cor. Where 1 At the senate-house ? 
Sic. There Coriolanus. 

Cor. May I change these garments ? 
Sic. You may, Sir. 

Cor. That I'll straight do, and knowing myself again, 

Eepair to the senate house. 
Men. I'll keep you company. — Will you along. 

Bru. We stay here for the people. 

Sic. Fare you well. 

[Exeunt Coriolanus and Menenius!] 

Be has it now • and by his looks, methinks, 
'Tis warm at his heart. 
Bru. With a proud heart he wore 

His humble weeds : Will you dismiss the people ? 

[This is the popular election: but the afterthought, the 
review, the critical review, is that which must follow, for this 



THE POPULAB ELECTION. 403 

is not the same people we had on the stage when the play 
began. They are the same in person, perhaps; but it is no 
longer a mob, armed with clubs, clamouring for bread, rushing 
forth to kill their chiefs, and have corn at their own price. 
It is a people conscious of their political power and dignity, 
an organised people; it is a people with a constituted head, 
capable of instructing them in the doctrine of political duties 
and rights. It is the tribune now who conducts this review of 
the Military Hero's civil claims. It is the careful, learned 
Tribune who initiates, from the heights of his civil wisdom, 
this great, popular veto, this deliberate ' rejection ' of the 
popular affirmation. For this is what is called, elsewhere, ' a 
negative instance/] 

[Re-enter Citizens.] 

Sic. How now, my masters ? have you chose this man 1 
First Cit. He has our voices, Sir. 

Bru. We pray the gods he may deserve your loves. 
Second Cit. Amen, Sir : To my poor unworthy notice, 

He mocked us when he begg'd our voices. 
Third Cit. Certainly 

He flouted us downright. 
First Cit. No, 'tis his kind of speech ; he did not mock us. 
Second Cit. Not one amongst us save yourself, but says, 

He used us scornfully : he should have show'd us 
His marks of merit, wounds received for his country. 
Sic. Why, so he did, I am sure. 

Cit. No ; no man saw 'em. [Several speak. 

Third Cit. He said he had wounds which he could show in private ; 
And with his hat, thus waving it in scorn, 
' I would be consul,' says he, ' aged custom, 
But by your voices, will not so permit me ; 
Your voices therefore :' When we granted that, 
Here was, — ' I thank you for your voices, — thank you, — 
Your most sweet voices ; — now you have left your voices, 

I have no further with you :' Was not this mockery ? 

Sic. Why, either, were you ignorant to see't 1 
Or, seeing it, of such childish friendliness 
To yield your voices ? 
Bru. Could you not have told him 

As you were lesson'd — when he had no power, 
But was a petty servant to the state, 
He was your enemy ; ever spake against 
D D 2 



404 THE CUKE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

Tour liberties, and the charters that you bear 
/' the body of the weal : and now arriving 
A place of potency, and sway o' the state, 
If he should still malignantly remain 
Fast foe to the plebeii, your voices might 

Be CURSES to YOURSELVES. 

Sic. Thus to have said 

As you were fore-advised, had touched his spirit, 
And tried his inchnation ; from him plucked, 
Either his gracious promise, which you might, 
As cause had called you up, have held him to ; 
Or else it would have galled his surly nature, 
Which easily endures, not article 
Tying him to aught ; — so putting him to rage, 
You should have ta'en advantage of his choler, 
And so left him unelected. 

[Somewhat sagacious instructions for these old Roman states- 
men to give, and not so very unlike those which English 
Commons found occasion to put in execution not long after.] 

Bru. Did you perceive he did solicit you in free contempt, 
When he did need your loves ; and do you think 
That his contempt shall not be bruising to you, 
When he hath power to crush ? Why had your bodies 
No heart among you, or had you tongues 
To cry against the rectorship of — judgment? 
Sic. Have you 

Ere now, deny'd the asker, and now again, 

On him that did not ask, but mock, [with a pretence of 

asking,] bestow 
Your sued for tongues ? 
Third Cit. He's not confirmed, we may deny him yet. 
Second Cit. And will deny him : 

Til have five hundred voices of that sound. 
First Cit. I, twice five hundred, and their friends to piece 'em* 
Bru. Get you hence instantly, and tell those friends, 
They have chose a consul that will from them 
Take their liberties, make them of no more voice 
Than dogs, that are as often beat for barking, 

As KEPT TO DO SO. 

Sic. Let them assemble, 

And on a safer judgment, all revoke 

Your ignorant election. 
Bru. Lay 

A fault on us, your tribunes ; that we laboured, 

No impediment between, but that you must 
Cast your election on him. 



THE POPULAR ELECTION. 405 

Stc. Say, you chose him 

More after our commandment, than as guided 
By your own true affections, and that your minds, 
Pre-occupied with what you rather must do, 
Than what you skoidd, made you against the grain 
To voice him consul : lay the fault on us. 

Bru. Ay, spare us not. Say we read lectures to you, 
How youngly he began to serve his country, 
How long continued, and what stock he springs of ;* 
The noble house 0' the Marcians, from whence came, 
That Ancus Martius, JVumas daughter's son, 
Who, after great Hostilius, here was king : 
Of the same house Publius and Quintus were, 
That our best water brought by conduits hither ; 
And Censorinus, darling of the people, 
And nobly named so, being censor twice, 
Was his great angestor. 

[Of course this man has never meddled with the classics at 
all. His reading and writing comes by nature.] 

Sic. One thus descended, 

That hath beside well in his person wrought, 

To be set high in place, we did commend 

To your remembrances ; but you have found, 

Scaling his present bearing with his past, 

That he's your fixed enemy, and REVOKE 

Your sudden approbation. 
Bru. Say you ne'er had doue't, — 

Harp on that still, — but by our putting on, 

And presently when you have drawn your number, 

Repair to the Capitol. 
Citizens. [Several speak.] We will so. Almost all 

Repent in their election. [Exeunt Citizens 

Bru. Let them go on. 

This mutiny were better put in hazard, 

Than stay, past doubt, for greater ; 

If, as his nature is, he fall in rage 

With their refusal, both observe and answer 

The vantage of his anger. 
Sic. To the Capitol : 

Come, we'll be there before the stream 0' the people, 

And this shall seem, as partly His, their own 

Which WE HAVE GOADED ONWARD. 

* See the Play of Henry the Seventh, Founder of the Elizabethan 
Tyranny, by the same author. 



406 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WE^L. 

We have witnessed the popular election on the scientific 
boards: we have seen, now, in all its scientific detail, the civil 
confirmation of the soldier's vote on the battle-field : we have 
seen it in the senate-chamber and in the market-place, and we 
saw it in ' the smothered stalls, and bulks, and windows,' and 
on ' the leads and ridges': we have seen and heard it, not in 
the shower and thunder that the commons made with their 
caps and voices only, but in the scarfs, and gloves, and handker- 
chiefs, which ' the ladies, and maids, and matrons threw.' We 
have seen each single contribution to this great public act put 
in by the Poet's selected representative of classes. ' The kitchen 
malkin, with her richest lockram pinned on her neck, clamber- 
ing the wall to eye him/ spake for hers ; ' the seld-shown flamen, 
puffing his way to win a vulgar station,' was hastening to 
record the vote of his; ' the veiled dame, exposing the war of 
white and damask in her nicely-gawded cheeks to the spoil of 
Phebus' burning kisses,' was a tribune, too, in this Poet's distri- 
bution of the tribes, and spake out for the veiled dames ; ' the 
prattling nurse/ who will give her baby that is ' crying itself 
into a rapture there, while she chats him ' her reminiscence of 
this scene by and by, was there to give the nurses' appro- 
bation. 

For this is the vote which the great Tribune has to sum up 
and count, when he comes to review at last, f in a better hour/ 
these spontaneous public acts — these momentous acts that 
seal up the future, and bind the unborn generations of the 
advancing kind with the cramp of their fetters. Not less care- 
ful than this is the analysis when he undertakes to track to its 
historic source one of those practical axioms, one of those 
received beliefs, which he finds determining the human con- 
duct, limiting the human history, moulding the characters of 
men, determining beforehand what they shall be. This is the 
process when he undertakes, to get one of these rude, instinc- 
tive, spontaneous affirmations — one of those idols of the 
market or of the Tribe — reviewed and criticised by the heads 
of the Tribe, at least, ' in a better hoiir,' — criticised and re- 
jected. ' Proceeding by negatives and exclusion first' : this is 



THE POPULAR ELECTION. 407 

the form in which this Tribune puts on record his scientific 
veto of that ' ignorant election.' 

And in this so carefully selected and condensed combination 
of historical spectacles — in this so new, this so magnificently 
illustrated political history — there is another historic moment 
to be brought out now ; and in this same form of ' visible 
history/ one not less important than those already exhibited. 

In the scene that follows, we have, in the Poet's arrangement, 
the great historic spectacle of a people ' revoking their 
ignorant election,' under the instigation and guidance of 
those same remarkable leaders, whose voice had been wanting 
(as they are careful to inform us) till then in the business of 
the state; leaders who contrive at last to inform the people, in 
plain terms, that they ' are at point to lose their liberties,' that 
' Marcius will have all from them,' and who apologise for their 
conduct afterwards by saying, that ' he affected one sole throne, 
without assistance 1 ; for the time had come when the Tribune 
could repeat the Poet's whisper, ' The one side shall have 
bale.' 

This so critical spectacle is boldly brought out and exhibited 
here in all its actual historical detail. It is produced by one 
who is able to include in his dramatic programme the whole 
sweep of its eventualities, the whole range of its particulars, 
because he has made himself acquainted with the forces, he 
has ascended, by scientifically inclusive definition, to the 
' powers' that are to be ' operant' in it; and he who has that 
' charactery' of nature, may indeed ' lay the future open.' We 
talk of prophecy ; but there is nothing in literature to compare 
at all with this great specimen of the prophecy of Induction. 
There is nothing to compare with it in its grasp of particulars, 
in its comprehension and historic accuracy of detail. 

But this great speech, which he entreats for leave to make 
before that revolutionary movement, which in its weak begin- 
nings in his time lay intreasured, should proceed any further 
— this preliminary speech, with its so vivid political illustra- 
tion, is not yet finished. The true doctrine of an instructed 
scientific election and government, that ' vintage' of politics — 



408 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

that vintage of scientific definitions and axioms which he is 
getting out of this new kind of history — that new vintage of 
the higher, subtler fact, which this fine selected, adapted history, 
will be made to yield, is not yet expressed. The fault with 
the popular and instinctive mode of inquiry is, he tells us, that 
it begins with affirmation — but that is the method for gods, 
and not men — men must begin with negations; they must 
have tables of review of instances, tables of negation, tables of 
rejection; and divide nature, not with fire, but with the mind, 
that divine fire. If the mind attempt this affirmation from 
the first,' he says, ' which it always will when left to itself 
there will spring up phantoms, mere theories, and ill-defined 
notions, with axioms requiring daily correction. These will be 
better or worse, according to the power and strength of the 
understanding which creates them. But it is only for God to 
recognise forms affirmatively, at the first glance of contempla- 
tion; men can only proceed first by negatives, and then to 
conclude with affirmatives, after every species of rejection/ 
And though he himself appears to be profoundly absorbed 
with the nature of heat, at the moment in which he first 
produces these new scientific instruments, which he calls tables 
of review, and explains their 'facilities.' he tells us plainly, 
that they are adapted to other subjects, and that those affirma- 
tions which are most essential to the welfare of man, will in 
due time come off from them, practical axioms on matters of 
universal and incessant practical concern, that will not want 
daily correction, that will not want revolutionary correction, to 
fit them to the exigency. 

The question here is not of ' heat,' but of sovereignty ; 
it is the question of the consulship, regarded from the ground 
of the tribuneship. It is not Coriolanus that this tribune is 
spending so much breath on. The instincts, which unanalytic, 
barbaric ages, enthrone and mistake for greatness and nobility, 
are tried and rejected here; and the business of the play is, to 
get them excluded from the chair of state. The philosopher 
will have those instincts which men, in their ' particular and 
private natures,' share with the lower orders of animals, 



THE POPULAR ELECTION. 409 

searched out, and put in their place in human affairs, which is 
not, as he takes it, the head — the head of the common- 
"weal. It is not Coriolanus; the author has no spite at all 
against him — he is partial to him, rather; it is not Coriolanus 
but the instincts that are on trial here, and the man — the so- 
called man — of instinct, who has no principle of state and 
sovereignty, no principle of true manliness and nobility in his 
soul; and the trial is not yet completed. The author would 
be glad to have that revolution which he has inserted in the 
heart of this play deferred, if that were possible, though he 
knows that it is not; he thinks it would be a saving of trouble 
if it could be deferred until some true and scientifically pre- 
pared notions, some practical axioms, which would not need in 
their turn fierce historical correction — revolutionary correction 
— could be imparted to the common mind. 

But we must follow him in this process of division and ex- 
clusion a little further, before we come in our plot to the 
revolution. That revolution which he foresees as imminent 
and inevitable, he has put on paper here: but there is another 
lurking within, for which we are not yet ripe. This locked-up 
tribune will have to get abroad ; he will have to get his limits 
enlarged, and find his way into some new departments, before 
ever that can begin. 



410 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD IN POLITICS. 

1 If any man think philosophy and universality to he idle studies, he 
doth not consider that all professions are from thence served and sup- 
plied.' Advancement of Learning. 

* We leave room on every subject for the human or optative part; 
for it is a part of science to make judicious inquiries and wishes.' 

Novum Organum. 

4 S to the method of this new kind of philosophical inquiry, 
-*"*- which is brought to bear here so stedfastly upon the 
most delicate questions, at a time when the Play-house was 
expressly forbidden by a Royal Ordinance, on pain of dissolu- 
tion, to touch them — in an age, too, when Parliaments were 
lectured, and brow-beaten, and rudely sent home, for con- 
tumaciously persisting in meddling with questions of state — 
in an age in which prelates were shrilly interrupted in the 
pulpit, in the midst of their finest and gravest Sunday dis- 
course, and told, in the presence of their congregations, to hold 
their tongues and mind their own business, if they chanced to 
touch upon ' questions of church,' on a day when the Head of 
the Church herself, in her own sacred person, in her largest 
ruff, and * rustling' in her last silk, happened to be in her pew; 
— as to the method of the philosophical investigations which 
were conducted under such critical conditions, of course there 
was no harm in displaying that in the abstract, as a method 
merely. As a method of philosophical inquiry, there was no 
harm in presenting it in a tolerably lucid and brilliant manner, 
accompanying the exhibition with careful, and apparently spe- 
cific, directions as to the application of it to indifferent subjects. 
There was no harm, indeed, in blazoning this method a little, 
and in soliciting the attention of the public, and the attention 



THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD IN POLITICS. 41 I 

of mankind in general, to it in a somewhat extraordinary man- 
ner, not without some considerable blowing of trumpets. 
As a method of philosophical inquiry, merely, what earthly 
harm could it do? Surely there was no more innocent thing 
in nature than ' your philosophy/ then, so far as any overt 
acts were concerned ; it certainly was the last thing in the 
world that a king or a queen need trouble their heads about 
then. Who cared what methods the philosophers were taking, 
or whether this was a new one or an old one, so that the men 
of letters could understand it? The modern Solomon was fain 
to confess that, for his part, he could not — that it was be- 
yond his depth; whereas the history of Henry the Seventh, 
by the same author, appeared to him extremely clear and 
lively, and quite within his range, and to that he gave his own 
personal approbation. The other work, however, as it was 
making so much noise in the world, and promising to go 
down to posterity, would serve to adorn his reign, and make 
it illustrious in future ages. 

There was no harm in this philosopher's setting forth his 
method then, and giving very minute and strict directions in 
regard to its applications to ( certain subjects.' As to what 
the Author of it did with it himself — that, of course, was 
another thing, and nobody's business but his own just then, as 
it happened. 

So totally was the world off its guard at the moment of this 
great and greatest innovation in its practice — so totally un- 
accustomed were men then to look for anything like power in 
the quarter from which this seemed to be proceeding — so im- 
possible was it for this single book to remove that previous 
impression — that the Author of the Novum Organum could 
even venture to intersperse these directions, with regard to its 
specific and particular applications, with pointed and not infre- 
quent allusions to the comprehensive nature — the essentially 
comprehensive nature — of' the Machine,' whose application to 
these certain instances he is at such pains to specify ; he could, 
indeed, produce it with a continuous side-long glance at this 
so portentous quality of it. 



412 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

Nay, he could go farther than that, and venture to assert 
openly, over his own name, and leave on record for the benefit 
of posterity, the assertion that this new method of inquiry does 
apply, directly and primarily, to those questions in which 
the human race are primarily concerned; that it strikes at 
once to the heart of those questions, and was invented to that 
end. 

Such a certificate and warranty of the New Machine was 
put up by the hands of the Inventor on the face of it, when 
he dedicated it to the human use —t- when he appealed in its 
behalf from the criticism of the times that were near, to those 
that were far off. Nay, he takes pains to tell us; he tells us 
in that same moment, what one who studies the Novum 
Organum with the key of ' Times' does not need to be told — 
can see for himself — that in his description of the method he 
has already contrived to make the application, the universal 
practical application. 

In his prerogative instances, the mind of man is 
brought out already from its specific narrowness, from its 
own abstract logical conceits and arrogant prenotions, into 
that collision with fact — the broader fact, the universal fact 
— and subjected to that discipline from it which is the 
intention of this logic. It is a ' machine' which is meant to 
serve to Man as a ' New' Mind — the scientific mind, which is 
in harmony with nature — a mind informed and enlarged with 
the universal laws, the laws of kinds, instead of the sponta- 
neous uninstructed mind, instead of the narrow specific mind 
of a barbaric race, filled with its own preposterous prenotions 
and vain conceits, and at war with universal nature; boldly 
pursuing its deadly feud with that, priding itself on it, making 
a virtue of it. It is a machine in which those human faculties 
which are the gifts of God to man, as the instruments of his 
welfare, are for the first time scientifically conjoined. It is a 
Machine in which the senses, those hitherto despised instru- 
ments in philosophy, by means of a scientific rule and oversight, 
and with the aid of scientific instruments, are made available 
for philosophic purposes. It is a Machine in which that or- 



THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD IN POLITICS. 413 

ganization whereby the universal nature impresses itself on us 
— reports itself to us — striking its incessant telegraphs on us, 
whether we read them or not, is for the first time brought to 
the philosopher's aid; and it is a Machine, also, by which 
speculation, that hitherto despised instrument in practice, is for 
the first time, brought to the aid of the man of practice. It 
is doubly ' New' : it is a Machine in which speculation be- 
comes practical — it is a Machine in which practice becomes 
scientific* 

In ' the prerogative instances/ the universal matter 
of fact is already taken up and disposed of in grand masses, 
under these headships and chief cases, not in a miscellaneous, 
but scientific manner. The Nature of Things is all there; for 
this is a Logic which bows the mind of man to the law of the 
universal nature, and informs and enlarges it with that. It is 
not a Logic merely in the old sense of that term. The old 
Logic, and the cobwebs of metaphysics that grew out of it, 
are the things which this Machine is going to pufFaway, with 
the mere whifF and wind of its inroads into nature, and disperse 
for ever. It is not a logic merely as logic has hitherto been 
limited, but a philosophy. A logic in which the general 
'notions of nature ' which are causes, powers, simple powers, 
elemental powers, true differences, are substituted for those 
spontaneous, rude, uncorrected, specific notions, — ^ore-notions 
of men, which have in that form, as they stand thus, no 
correlative in nature, and are therefore impotent — not true 
terms and forms, but air-words, air-lines, merely. It is a logic 
which includes the Mind of Nature, and her laws; and not 
one which is limited to the mind of Man, and so fitted to its 
incapacity as to nurse him in his natural ignorance, to educate 
him in his born foolery and conceit, to teach him to ignore by 
rule, and set at nought the infinite mystery of nature. 

* Fool. Canst thou tell why a man's nose stands in the middle of his 
face 1 

Lear. No. 

Fool. Why, to keep his eyes on either side of it, that what he cannot 
smell out, he may spy into. 



414 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

The universal history, all of it that the mind of man is 
constituted to grasp, is here in the general, under these pre- 
rogative instances, in the luminous order of the Inventor 
of this science, blazing throughout with his genius, and the 
mind that has abolished its prenotions, and renounced its 
rude, instinctive, barbaric tendencies, and has taken this 
scientific Organ um instead; has armed itself with the Nature 
of Things, and is prepared to grapple with all specifications 
and particulars. 

The author tells us plainly, that those seemingly pedantic ar- 
rangements with which he is compelled to perplex his subject in 
this great work of his, the work in which he openly introduces 
HIS INNOVATION, — as that — will fall off by and by, when 
there is no longer any need of them. They are but the natural 
guards with which great Nature, working in the instinct of the 
philosophic genius, protects her choicest growth, — the husk of 
that grain which must have times, and a time to grow in, — the 
bark which the sap must stop to build, ere its delicate works 
within are safe. They are like the sheaths with which she hides 
through frost and wind and shower, until their hour has come, 
her vernal patterns, her secret toils, her magic cunning, her 
struggling aspirations, her glorious successes, her celestial 
triumphs. 

In the midst of this studious fog of scholasticism, this com- 
plicated network of superficial divisions, the man of humour, 
who is always not far off and ready to assist in the priestly minis- 
trations as he sees occasion , gently directs our attention to those 
more simple and natural divisions of the subject, and those 
more immediately practical terms, which it might be possible to 
use, under certain circumstances, in speaking of the same sub- 
jects, into which, however, these are easily resolvable, as soon as 
the right point of observation is taken. Through all this 
haze, he contrives to show us confidentially, the outline of 
those grand natural divisions, which he has already clearly pro- 
duced — under their scholastic names, indeed, — in his book of 
the Advancement of Learning ; but which he cannot so openly 
continue, in a work produced professedly, as a practical instru- 



1 



THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD IN POLITICS. 415 

ment fit for application to immediate use, and where the true 
application is constantly entering the vitals of subjects too deli- 
cate to be openly glanced at then. 

But he gives us to understand, however, that he has made 
the application of this method to practice, in a much more spe- 
cific, detailed manner, in another place, that he has brought it 
down from those more general forms of the Novum Organum, 
into ' the nobler ' departments, ' the more chosen' departments 
of that universal field of human practice, which the Novum 
Organum takes up in its great outline, and boldly and clearly 
claims in the general, though when it comes to specific appli- 
cations and particulars, it does so stedfastly strike, or appear to 
strike, into that one track of practice, which was the only one 
left open to it then, — which it keeps still as rigidly as if it had 
no other. He has brought it out, he tells us, from that trunk 
of 'universality,' and carried it with his own hand into the 
minutest points and fibres of particulars, those points and fibres, 
those living articulations in which the grand natural divisions 
he indicates here, naturally terminate; the divisions which the 
philosopher who ' makes the Art and Practic part of life, the 
mistress to his Theoric,' must of course follow. He tells us 
that he has applied it to particular arts, to those depart- 
ments of the human experience and practice in which the need 
of a rule is most felt, and where things have been suffered to 
go on hitherto, in a specially miscellaneous manner, and that 
his axioms of practice in these departments have been so 
scientifically constructed from particulars, that he thinks they 
will be apt to know their way to particulars again ; — that 
their specifications are at the same time so comprehensive and 
so minute, that he considers them fit for immediate use, or at 
least so far forth fitted, as to require but little skill on the part 
of the practitioner, to insure them against failure in practice. 
The process being, of course, in this application to the exigen- 
cies of practice, necessarily disentangled from those technical- 
ities and relics of the old wordy scholasticism in which he 
was compelled to incase and seal up his meanings, in his pro- 
fessedly scientific works, and especially in his professedly prac- 
tical scientific work. 



416 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

But these so important applications of his philosophy to 
practice, of which be issues so fair a prospectus, though he 
frequently refers to them, could not then be published. The 
time had not come, and personally, he was obliged to leave, 
before it came. He was careful, however, to make the best 
provision which could be made, under such circumstances, for 
the carrying out of his intentions ; for he left a will. These 
works of //rac^'ce could not then be published; and if they could 
have been, there was no public then ready for them. They could 
not be published; but there was nothing to hinder their being 
put under cover. There was no difficulty to a man of skill in 
packing them up in a portable form, under lids and covers of 
one sort and another, so unexceptionable, that all the world 
could carry them about, for a century or two. and not perceive 
that there was any harm in them. Very curiously wrought 
covers they might be too, with some taste of the wonders of 
mine art pressing through, a little here and there. They 
might be put under a very gorgeous and attractive cover in 
one case, and under a very odd and fantastic one in another; 
but in such a manner as to command, in both cases, the ad- 
miration and wonder of men, so as to pique perpetually their 
curiosity and provoke inquiry, until the time had come and 
the key was found. 

' Some may raise this question,' he says, talking as he does some- 
times in the historical plural of his philosophic chair, — 'this 
question, rather than objection? — [it was much to be preferred 
in that form certainly] — whether we talk of perfecting natu- 
ral philosophy alone, according to our method, or the 
other sciences such as — ethics, logic, politics.' A pretty 
question to raise just then, truly, though this philosopher sees 
fit to take it so demurely. ' Whether we talk of perfecting 
politics with our method,' Elizabethan politics, — and not poli- 
tics only, but whether we talk of perfecting ' ethics ' with it 
also, and ' logic, — common logic,' which last is as much in 
need of perfecting as anything, and the beginning of perfect- 
ing of that is the reform in the others. f We certainly in- 
tend,' — the emphasis here is on the word l . certainly? though 



THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD IN POLITICS. 417 

the reader who has not the key of the times may not perceive 
it; 'We certainly intend to comprehend them all/ For 
this is the author whose words are most of them emphatic. 
We must read his sentences more than once to get all the em- 
phasis. We certainly INTEND to comprehend them all. 
' We are not vain promisers,' he says, emphasizing that word 
in another place, and putting this intention into the shape of a 
promise. 

And as common logic which regulates matters by syllogism is 
applied, not only to natural, but to every other science, so our 
inductive method likewise, comprehends them all. — Again — 
[he thinks this bears repeating, repeating in this connection, for 
now he is measuring the claims of this new method, this new 
logic, with the claims of that which he finds in possession, re- 
gulating matters by syllogism, not producing a very logical 
result, however:] ' For we form a history, and tables of inven- 
tion, for anger, fear, shame, and the like, [that is we form 
a history and tables of invention for the passions or affections,] 
and also for examples in civil life, and the mental 

operations as well as for heat, cold, light, 

vegetation and the like; and he directs us to the 
Fourth Part of the Instauration, which he reserves for his 
noblest and more chosen subjects for the confirmation of this 
assertion. 

' But since our method of interpretation, after preparing and 
arranging a history, does not content itself with examining 
the opinions and desires of the mind — [hear] — like common 
logic, but also inspects the nature of things, we so regulate 
the mind that it may be enabled to apply itself, in every respect, 
correctly to that nature? Our examples in this part of the work, 
which is but a small and preparatory part of it, are limited, as 
you will observe, to heat, cold, light, vegetation, and the like ; 
but this is the explanation of the general intention, which will 
enable you to disregard that circumstance in your reading of 
it. Those examples will serve their purpose with the minds 
that they detain. They are preparatory, and greatly useful. 
But if you read this new logic from the height of this ex- 

E E 



41 8 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

planation, you will have a mind, formed by that process, able 
to apply itself, in every respect, correctly to the subjects 
omitted here by name, but so clearly claimed, not as the 
proper subjects only, but as the actual subjects of the new 
investigation. But lest you should not understand this ex- 
planation, he continues — ' On this account we deliver necessary 
and various precepts in our doctrine of interpretation, so that we 
may apply, in some measure, to the method of discovering the 
quality and condition of the subject matter of investigation. 
And this is the apology for omitting here, or seeming to omit, 
such sciences as Ethics, Politics, and that science which is 
alluded to under the name of Common Logic. 

This is, indeed, a very instructive paragraph, though it is a 
gratuitous one for the scholar who has found leisure to read 
this work with the aid of that doctrine of interpretation referred 
to, especially if he is already familiar with its particular 
applications to the noble subjects just specified. 

Among the prerogative instances — ' suggestive instances ' 
are included — ' such as suggest or point out that which is advan- 
tageous to mankind ; for hare power and knowledge in themselves 
exalt, rather than enrich, human nature. We shall have a better 
opportunity of discovering these, when we treat of the application 
to practice. Besides, in the work of interpretation, we 
LEAVE ROOM ON EVERY SUBJECT for the human or optative 
part; FOR IT is A part of science, to make judicious 
inquiries and wishes.' ' The generally useful instances. 
They are such as relate to various points, and frequently occur, 
sparing by that means considerable labour and new trials. The 
proper place for speaking of instruments, and contrivances, will 
be that in which we speak of application to practice, and the 
method of experiment. All that has hitherto been ascertained 
and made use of, -will be applied in the particular his- 
tory of each art.' [We certainly intend to include them 
ALL, such as Ethics, Politics, and Common Logic] 

' We have now, therefore, exhibited the species, or simple 
elements of the motions, tendencies, and active powers, which are 
most universal in nature; and no small portion of natural, 



THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD IN POLITICS. 419 

that is, universal science, has been sketched out. We do 
not, however, deny that OTHER INSTANCES can, perhaps, be 
added'' (he has confined himself chiefly to the physical agencies 
under this head, with a sidelong glance at others, now and 
then), ' and our divisions changed to some more natural order of 
things [hear], and also reduced to a less number [hear], in 
which respect we do not allude to any abstract classification, as 
if one were to say,' — and he quotes here, in this apparently 
disparaging manner, his own grand, new-coined classification, 
which he has drawn out with his new method from the heart 
of nature, and applied to the human, — which he had to go into 
the universal nature to find, that very classification which he 
has exhibited abstractly in his Advancement of Learning — ab- 
stractly, and, therefore, without coming into any dangerous 
contact with any one's preconceptions, — 'as if one were to 
say, that bodies desire the preservation, exaltation, propagation, 
or fruition of their natures; or, that motion tends to the pre- 
servation and benefit, either of the universe, as in the case 
of the motions of resistance and connection — those two universal 
motions and tendencies — or of. extensive wholes, as in 
the case of those of the greater congregation' These are 
phrases which look innocent enough; there is no offensive 
approximation to particulars here, apparently ; what harm can 
there be in the philosophy of c extensive wholes,' and 'larger 
congregations'? Nobody can call that meddling with ' church 
and state.' Surely one may speak of the nature of things in 
general, under such general terms as these, without being sus- 
pected of an intention to innovate. ' Have you heard the ar- 
gument?' says the king to Hamlet. ? Is there no offence in it?' 
1 None in the world.' But the philosopher goes on, and does come 
occasionally, even here, to words which begin to sound a little 
suspicious in such connexions, or would, if one did not know 
how general the intention must be in this application of them. 
They are abstract terms, and, of course, nobody need see that 
they are a different kind of abstraction from the old ones, that 
the grappling-hook on all particulars has been abstracted in 
them. Suppose one were to say, then, to resume, ' that motion 

e e 2 



420 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

tends to the preservation and benefit, either of the universe, as 
in the case of the motions of resistance and connection, or of 
extensive wholes, as in the case of the motions of the greater 
congregation — [what are these motions, then?] — revolu- 
tion and abhorrence of change, or of particular forms, as 
in the case of the others.' This looks a little like growing 
towards a point. We are apt to consider these motions in 
certain specific forms, as they appear in those extensive wholes 
and larger congregations, which it is not necessary to name 
more particularly in this connection, though they are terms of 
a 'suggestive' character, to borrow the author's own expression, 
and belong properly to subjects which this author has just 
included in his system. 

But this is none other than his own philosophy which he 
seems to be criticising, and rating, and rejecting here so scorn- 
fully; but if we go on a little further, we shall find what the 
criticism amounts to, and that it is only the limitation of it to 
the general statement — that it is the abstract form of it, which 
he complains of. He wishes to direct our attention to the fact, 
that he does not consider it good for anything in that general 
form in which he has put it in his Book of Learning. This 
is the deficiency which he is always pointing out in that work, 
because this is the deficiency which . it has been his chief 
labour to supply. Till that defect, that grand defect which 
his philosophy exhibits, as it stands in his books of abstract 
science, is supplied — that defect to which, even in these works 
themselves, he is always directing our attention — he cannot, 
without self-contradiction, propound his philosophy to the 
world as a practical one, good for human relief. 

In order that it should accomplish the ends to which it is 
addressed, it is not enough, he tells us in so many words, to 
exhibit it in the abstract, in general terms, for these are but 
' the husks and shells of sciences.' It must be brought down 
and applied to those artistic reformations which afflicted, 
oppressed human nature demands — to those artistic construc- 
tions to which human nature spontaneously, instinctively 
tends, and empirically struggles to achieve. 



THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD IN POLITICS. 42 1 

'For although ,' he continues, 'such remarks — those last 
quoted — be just, unless they terminate in matter and con- 
struction, according to the true definitions, they are 
speculative, and of little use.' But in the Novum Or- 
ganum, those more natural divisions are reduced to a form in 
which it IS possible to commence practice with them at once, in 
certain departments, where there is no objection to innovation, 
— where the proposal for the relief of the human estate is met 
Avithout opposition, — where the new scientific achievements 
in the conquest of nature are met with a universal, unanimous 
human plaudit and gratulation. 

' In the meantime,' he continues, after condemning those 
abstract terms, and declaring, that unless they terminate in 
matter and construction, according to true definitions, they are 
speculative, and of little use — ' In the meantime, our classification 
ivill suffice, and be of much use in the consideration of the 
predominance of powers, and examining: the wrestling 
instances, which constitute our present subject.' [The 
subject that was, present then. The question.] 

So that the Novum Organum presents itself to us, in these 
passages, only as a preparation and arming of the mind for a 
closer dealing with the nature of things, in particular in- 
stances, which are not there instanced, — for those more critical 
' wrestling instances ' which the scientific re-constructions, 
according to true definitions, in the higher departments of 
human want will constitute, — those wrestling instances, which 
will naturally arise whenever the philosophy which concerns 
itself experimentally with the question of the predominance 
of powers — the philosophy which includes in its programme 
the practical application of the principles of revolution and 
abhorrence of change, in ' greater congregations ' and ' exten- 
sive wholes,' as well as the principles of motion in ' particular 
forms ' — shall come to be applied to its nobler, to its noblest 
subjects. That is the philosophy which dismisses its techni- 
calities, which finds such words as these when the question of 
the predominance of powers, and the question of revolution 
and abhorrence of cnange in the greater congregations and 



422 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

extensive wholes, comes to be practically handled. This is 
the way we philosophise ' when we come to particulars.' 

' In a rebellion, 
When what's not meet, but what must be, was law, 
Then were they chosen. In a better hour, 
Let what is meet be said it must be meet, 
And throw their power in the dust.'' 

That is what we should call, in a general way, ' the motion 
of revolution' in our book of abstractions; this is the moment 
in which it ■predominates over ' the abhorrence of change,' if not 
in the extensive whole — if not in the whole of the greater 
congregation, in that part of it for whom this one speaks; and 
this is the critical moment which the man of science makes so 
much of, — brings out so scientifically, so elaborately in this ex- 
periment. But this is a part of science which he is mainly 
familiar with. Here is a place, for instance, where the motion 
of particular forms is skilfully brought to the aid of that larger 
motion. Here we have an experiment in which these petty 
motives come in to aid the revolutionary movement in the 
minds of the leaders of it, and with their feather's weight 
turn the scale, when the abhorrence of change is too nicely 
balanced with its antagonistic force for a predominance of 
powers without it. 

'But for my single self, 
I had as lief not be, as live to be 
In awe of such a thing as 1 myself. 

I was born free as Caesar ; so were you. 

* * * 

Why man, he doth bestride the narrow world 

Like a Colossus", and we, petty men, 

Walk under his huge legs, and peep about 

To find ourselves dishonorable graves. 

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, 

But in ourselves, that we are underlings. 

Brutus and Caesar. What should be in that Caesar ? 

Why should that name be sounded more than yours ? 

Conjure with them ; 
Brutus will start a spirit as soon as Caesar. 
Now in the name of all the gods at once, 



THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD IN POLITICS. 423 

Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed, 
That he is grown so great ? Age, thou, art shamed : 
Rome, thou hast lost the breed of noble bloods. 
When went there by an Age, since the great flood, 
But it was famed with more than with one man ? 
When could they say, till now, that talked of Rome, 
That her wide walls encompassed but One Man ? 
Now is it Rome indeed, and room enough, 
When there is in it but One Only Man. 
* * * 

What you would work me to, I have some aim ; 

How I have thought of this, and of these times, 

I shall recount hereafter. 

Now could 1, Casca, 

Name to thee a man most like this dreadful night ; 

That thunders, lightens, opens graves, and roars 

As doth the lion in the Capitol, 

A man no mightier than thyself, or me, 

In personal action ; yet prodigious grown, 

And fearful as these strange eruptions are? 
1 'T is Caesar that you mean : Is it not, Cassius V 
1 Let it be — who it is : for Romans now 

Have thewes and limbs like to their ancestors. 
* * * 

Poor man, I know he would not be a wolf, 

But that he sees the Romans are but sheep. 

He were no lio?t, were not Romans hinds. 

Those that with haste will make a mighty fire, 

Begin it with — weak straws. What trash is — Rome (?) 

What rubbish, and what offal, when it serves 

For the base matter to illuminate 

So vile a thing as — Caesar. But — 

1 perhaps speak this 

Before a willing bondman.' 

And here is another case where the question of the pre- 
dominance of powers arises. In this instance, it is the 
question of British freedom that comes up; and the tribute — 
not the tax — that a Caesar — the first Caesar himself, had 
exacted, is refused 'in a better hour,' by a people kindling 
with ancestral recollections, throwing themselves upon their 
ancient rights, and ' the natural bravery of their isle,' and 
ready to re-assert their ancient liberties. 

The Ambassador of Augustus makes his master's complaint 



424 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

at the British Court. The answer of the State runs thus, 
king, queen and prince taking part in it, as the Poet's con- 
venience seems to require. 

'This tribute,' complains the Roman; ' by thee, lately, is 
left untendered.' 

Queen. And, to kill the marvel, 

Shall be so ever. 
Prince Cloten. There be many Caesars, 

Ere such another Julius. Britain is 
A world by itself ; and we will nothing pay 
For wearing our own noses. [General principles. 

Queen. That opportunity 

Which then they had to take from us, to resume 
We have again. Remember, sir, my liege, 

[It is the people who are represented here by Cymbeline.] 

The kings your ancestors ; together with 
The natural bravery of your isle ; which stands 
As Neptune's park, ribbed and paled in 
With rocks unscaleable, and roaring waters ; 
With sands, that will not bear your enemies' boats, 
But suck them up to the top-mast. 
# * * 

Cloten. Come, there 's no more tribute to be paid : Our kingdom 
is stronger than it was at that time ; and, as I said, there is no more 
such Caesars : other of them may have crooked noses ; but, to owe 
such straight arms, none. 

Cymbeline. Son, let your mother end. 

Cloten. We have yet many among us can gripe as hard as Cassibelan : 
I do not say, 1 am one ; but 1 have a hand. — Why tribute ? Why 
should we pay tribute ? If Caesar can hide the sun from us with a 
blanket, or put the moon in his pocket, we will pay him tribute 
for light ; else, Sir, no more tribute, pray you now. 
Cymbeline. You must know, 

Till the injurious Romans did extort 
This tribute from us, we were free : Caesar's ambition 

against all colour, here 

Did put the yoke upon us ; which to shake off, 
Becomes a warlike people, whom we reckon 
Ourselves to be. We do say then to Caesar, 
Our ancestor was that Mulmutius, which 
Ordained our laws, whose use the sword op Caesar 
Hath too much mangled ; whose repair and franchise, 
, Shall, by the power we hold, be our good deed. 



THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD IN POLITICS. 425 

Mulmutius made our laws, 
Who was the first of Britain which did put 
His brows within a golden crown, and called 
Himself a king. 

That is the tune when the Caesar comes this way, to a 
people who* have such an ancestor to refer to; no matter what 
costume he comes in. This is Caesar in Britain ; and though 
Prince Cloten appears to incline naturally to prose, as the 
medium best adapted to the expression of his views, the 
blank verse of Cymbeline is as good as that of Brutus and 
Cassius, and seems to run in their vein very much. 

It is in some such terms as these that we handle those 
universal motions on whose balance the welfare of the world 
depends — * the motions of resistance and connection? as the 
Elizabethan philosopher, with a broader grasp than the New- 
tonian, calls them — when we come to the diagrams which 
represent particulars. This is the kind of language which this 
author adopts when he comes to the modifications of those 
motions which are incident to extensive wholes in the case of 
the greater congregations ; that is, ' revolution and 'abhorrence 
of change,' and to those which belong to particular forms also. 
For it is the science of life ; and when the universal science 
touches the human life, it will have nothing less vivacious 
than this. It will have the particular of life here also. It will 
not have abstract revolutionists, any more than it will have 
abstract butterflies, or bivalves, or univalves. This is the 
kind of 'loud' talk that one is apt to hear in this man's school; 
and the clash and clang that this very play now under review 
is full of, is just the noise that is sure to come out of his labora- 
tory, whenever he gets upon one of these experiments in c exten- 
sive wholes/ which he is so fond of trying. It is the noise 
that one always hears on his stage, whenever the question of 
' particular forms' and predominance of powers comes to be put 
experimentally, at least, in this class of ' wrestling instances.' 

For we have here a form of composition in which that more 
simple and natural order above referred to is adopted — where 
those clear scientific classifications, which this author himself 



426 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

plainly exhibits in another scientific work, though he disguises 
them in the Novum Organum, are again brought out, no 
longer in the abstract, but grappling the matter; where, in- 
stead of the scientific technicalities just quoted — instead of 
those abstract terms, such as e extensive wholes/ ' greater con- 
gregation,' ' fruition of their natures,' and the like' — we have 
terms not less scientific, the equivalents of these, but more 
living — words ringing with the detail of life in its scientific 
condensations — reddening with the glow, or whitening with 
the calm, of its ideal intensities — pursuing it everywhere — 
everywhere, to the last height of its poetic fervors and ex- 
altations. 

And it is because this so vivid popular science has its issue 
from this ' source' — it is because it proceeds from this scientific 
centre, on the scientific radii, through all the divergencies and 
refrangibilities of the universal beam — it is because all this 
inexhaustible multiplicity and variety of particulars is threaded 
with the fibre of the universal science — it is because all these 
thick -flowering imaginations, these ' mellow hangings/ are 
hung upon the stems and branches that unite in the trunk of the 
prima philosophia — it is because of this that men find it so 
prophetic, so inclusive, so magical; this is the reason they find 
all in it. • I have either told, or designed to tell, all,' says the 
expositor of these plays. ' What I cannot speak, I point out 
with my finger.' For all the building of this genius is a 
building on that scientific ground-plan he has left us; and that 
is a plan which includes all the human field. It is the plan of 
the Great Instauration. 



VOLUMNIA AND HER BOY. 427 



CHAPTER VII. 

VOLUMNIA AND HER BOY. 

' My boy Marcius approaches.' 

' Why should I war without the walls of Troy, 
That find such cruel battle here within? 
Each Trojan that is master of his heart, 
Let him to field.' 

Is not the ground which Machiavel wisely and largely discourseth 
concerning governments, that the way to establish and preserve them, 
is to reduce them ad principia ; a rule in religion and nature, as well 
as in civil administration? [Again.] Was not the Persian magic a 
reduction or correspondence of the principles and architectures of nature 
to the rules and policy of governments?' — [' Questions to be asked.~]' 
— Advancement of Learning. 

I"T is by means of this popular rejection of the Hero's claims, 
-*■ which the tribunes succeed in procuring, that the Poet is 
enabled to complete his exhibition and test of the virtue which 
he finds in his time ' chiefest among men, and that which 
most dignifies the haver'; the virtue which he finds in his 
time rewarded with patents of nobility, with patrician trust, 
with priestly authority, with immortal fame, and thrones and 
dominions, with the disposal of the human welfare, and the 
entail of it to the crack of doom — no matter what ' goslings' 
the law of entail may devolve it on. 

He makes use of this incident to complete that separation 
he is effecting in the hitherto unanalysed, ill-defined, popular 
notions, and received and unquestioned axioms of practice — 
that separation of the instinctive military heroism, and the 
principle of the so-called heroic greatness, from the true prin- 
ciples of heroism and nobility, the true principle of subjection 
and sovereignty in the individual human nature and in the 
common-weal. 

That martial virtue has been under criticism and suspicion 
from the beginning of this action. It was shown from the 
first — from that ground and point of observation which the 



428 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

sufferings of the diseased common-weal made for it — in no 
favourable light. It was branded in the first scene, in the 
person of its Hero, as 'a, dog to the commonalty.' It is one of 
the wretched ' commons' who invents, in his distress, that title 
for it; but the Poet himself exhibits it, not descriptively only, 
but dramatically, as something more brutish than that — eat- 
ing the poor man's corn that the gods have sent him, and 
gnawing his vitals, devouring him soul and body, ' tooth and 
fell.' It was shown up from the first as an instinct that men 
share with ' rats'. It was brought out from the first, and ex- 
hibited with its teeth in the heart of the common-weal. The 
Play begins with a cross-questioning in the civil streets, of 
that sentiment which the hasty affirmations of men enthrone. 
It was brought out from the first — it came tramping on in 
the first act, in the first scene — with its sneer at the commons' 
distress, longing to make ' a quarry of the quartered slaves, as 
high' as the plumed hero of it ' could prick his lance'; and 
that, too, because they rebelled at famine, as slaves will do 
sometimes, when the common notion of hunger is permitted to 
instruct them in the principle of new unions; when that so 
impressive, and urgent, and unappeasable teacher comes down 
to them from the Capitol, and is permitted by their rulers to 
induct them experimentally into the doctrine of ' extensive 
wholes,' and ' larger congregations,' and ' the predominance of 
powers.' And it so happened, that the threat above quoted 
was precisely the threat which the founder of the reigning 
house had been able to carry into effect here a hundred years 
before, in putting down an insurrection of that kind, as this 
author chanced to be the man to know. 

But the cry of the enemy is heard without; and this same 
principle, which shows itself in such questionable proofs of love 
at home, becomes with the change of circumstances — patriot- 
ism. But the Poet does not lose sight of its identity under 
this change. This love, that looks so like hatred in the Roman 
streets, that sniffs there so haughtily at questions about corn, 
and the price of ' coals,' and the price of labour, while it loves 
Rome so madly at the Volscian gates — this love, that sneers 



VOLUMNIA AND HER BOY. 429 

at the hunger and misery of the commons at home, while it 
makes such frantic demonstrations against the common enemy 
abroad, appears to him to be a very questionable kind of love, 
to say the least of it. 

In that fine, conspicuous specimen of this quality, which the 
hero of his story offers him — this quality which the hostilities 
of nations deify — he undertakes to sift it a little. While in 
the name of that virtue which has at least the merit of com- 
prehending and conserving a larger unity, a more extensive 
whole, than the limit of one's own personality, 'it runs reeking 
o'er the lives of men, as 't were a perpetual spoil' ; while under 
cover of that name which in barbaric ages limits human 
virtue, and puts down upon the map the outline of it — the 
bound which human greatness and virtue is required to come 
out to; while in the name of country it shows itself 'from face 
to foot a thing of blood, whose every motion is timed with 
dying cries,' undaunted by the tragic sublimities of the scene, 
this Poet confronts it, and boldly identifies it as that same 
principle of state and nobility which he has already exhibited 
at home. 

That sanguinary passion which the heat of conflict provokes 
is but the incident; it is the principle of acquisition, it is the 
natural principle of absorption, it is the instinct that nature is 
full of, that nature is alive with; but the one that she is at war 
with, too — at war with in the parts — one that she is for 
ever opposed to, and conquering in the members, with her 
mathematical axioms — with her law of the whole, of c the 
worthier whole/ of ' the greater congregation' ; it is that prin- 
ciple of acquisition which it is the business of the state to set 
bounds to in the human constitution — which gets branded 
with other names, very vulgar ones, too, when the faculty of 
grasp and absorption is smaller. That, and none other, is the 
principle which predominates, and is set at large here. The 
leashed ' dog' of the commonalty at home, is let slip here in 
the conquered town. The teeth that preyed on the Roman 
weal there, have elongated and grown wolfish on the Volscian 
fields. The consummation of the captor's deeds in the captured 



430 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

city — those matchless deeds of valor — the consummation for 
Coriolanus in Corioli, for ' the conqueror in the conquest,' is — 
' Now all 's His.' And the story of the battle without is — 
' He never stopped to ease his breast with panting, till he could 
call both field and city — OURS.' 

The Poet sets down nought in malice, but he will have the 
secret of this love, he will have the heart out of it — this 
love that stops so short with geographic limits, — that changes 
with the crossing of a line into a demon from the lowest 
pit. 

But it is a fair and noble specimen, it is a highly-qualified, 
' illustrious instance,' of this instinctive heroic virtue, he has 
seized on here, and made ready now for his experiment; and 
even when he brings him in, reeking from the fresh battle- 
field, with the blood undried on his brow, rejoicing in his 
harvest, even amid the horrors of the conquered town, this 
Poet, with his own ineffable and matchless grace of modera- 
tion, will have us pause and listen while his Coriolanus, ere he 
will take food or wine in his Corioli, gives orders that the 
Volscian who was kind to him personally — the poor man at 
whose house he lay — shall be saved, when he is so weary 
with slaying Volscians that ' his very memory is tired,' and he 
cannot speak his poor friend's name. 

He tracks this conqueror home again, and he watches him 
more sharply than ever — this man, whose new name is bor- 
rowed from his taken town. Coriolanus of Corioli. 
Marcius, plain Caius Marcius, now no more. He will think 
it treason — even in the conquered city he will resent it — if 
any presume to call him by that petty name henceforth, or 
forget for a breathing space to include in his identity the town 

— the town, that in its sacked and plundered streets, and 
dying cries — that, with that ' painting' which he took from it 
so lavishly, though he scorned the soldiers who took c spoons' 

— has clothed him with his purple honours: those honours 
which this Poet will not let him wear any longer, tracked in 
the misty outline of the past, or in the misty complexity of the 
unanalysed conceptions of the vulgar, the fatal unscientific 



VOLUMNIA AND HER BOYS. 43 1 

opinion of the many-headed many; that old coat of arms, which 
the man of science will trace now anew (and not here only) 
with his new historic pencil, which he will fill now anew — 
not here only — which he will fill on another page also, ' ap- 
proaching his particular more near' — with all its fresh, recent 
historic detail, with all its hideous, barbaric detail. 

He is jealous, — this new Poet of his kind, — he is jealous 
of this love that makes such work in Volscian homes, in 
Volscian mother's sons, under this name, ' that men sanctify, 
and turn up the white of the eyes to.' He flings out suspi- 
cions on the way home, that it is even narrower than it claims 
to be: he is in the city before it; he contrives to jet ajar into 
the sound of the trumpets that announce its triumphant entry; 
he has thrown over all the glory of its entering pageant, the 
suspicion that it is base and mercenary, that it is base and 
avaricious, though it puts nothing in its pocket, but takes its 
hire on its brows. 

Menenius. Brings a victory in his pocket. 
Volumnia. On's brows Menenius. 

He surprises the mother counting up the cicatrices. He 
arrests the cavalcade on its way to the Capitol, and bids us 
note, in those private whispers of family confidence, how the 
Camp and the Capitol stand in this hero's chart, put down on 
the road to ' our own house.' Nay, he will bring out the 
haughty chieftain in person, and show him on his stage, stand- 
ing in his ' wolfish gown,' showing the scars that he should hide, 
and asking, like a mendicant, for his hire. And though he 
does it proudly enough, and as if he did not care for this 
return, though he sets down his own services, and expects the 
people to set them down, to a disinterested love for his country, 
it is to this Poet's purpose to show that he was mistaken as to 
that. It is to his purpose to show that these two so different 
things which he finds confounded under one name and notion 
in the popular understanding here, and, what is worst of all, 
in the practical understanding of the populace, are two, and 
not one. That the mark of the primal differences, the 



432 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

original differences, the difference of things, the simplicity of 
nature herself divides them, makes two of them, two, — not 
one. He has caught one of those rude, vulgar notions here, 
which he speaks of elsewhere so often, those notions which 
make such mischief in the human life, and he is severely 
separating it — he is separating the martial virtue — from the 
true heroism, 'with the mind, that divine fire.' He is sepa- 
rating this kind of heroism from that cover under which it 
insinuates itself into governments, with which it makes its 
most bewildering claim to the popular approbation. 

He is bound to show that the true love of the common-weal, 
that principle which recognises and embraces the weal of 
others as its own, that principle which enters into and consti- 
tutes each man's own noblest life, is a thing of another growth 
and essence, a thing which needs a different culture from any 
that the Roman Volumnia could give it, a culture which un- 
alytic, barbaric ages — wanting in all the scientific arts — could 
not give it. 

He will show, in a conspicuous instance, what that kind of 
patriotism amounts to, in the man who aspires to ' the helm o' 
the State,' while there is yet no state within himself, while the 
mere instincts of the lower nature have, in their turn, the sway 
and sovereignty in him. He will show what that patriotism 
amounts to in one so schooled, when the hire it asks so dis- 
dainfully is withheld. And he will bring out this point too, 
as he brings out all the rest, in that large, scenic, theatric, 
illuminated lettering, which this popular design requires, and 
which his myth furnishes him, ready to his hand. He will 
have his ' transient hieroglyphics,' his tableaux vivants, his 
' dumb-shows ' to aid him here also, because this, too, is for 
the spectators — this, too, is for the audience whose eyes are 
more learned than their ears. 

It is a natural hero, one who achieves his greatness, and not 
one who is merely born great, whom the Poet deals with here. 
c He has that in his face which men love — authority? 'As 
waves before a vessel under sail, so men obey him and fall 
below his stern.' The Romans have stripped off his wings 



VOLUMNIA AND HER BOY. 433 

and turned him out of the city gates, but the heroic instinct 
of greatness and generalship is not thus defeated. He carries 
with him that which will collect new armies, and make him 
their victorious leader. Availing himself of the pride and 
hostility of nations, he is sure of a captaincy. His occupation 
is not gone so long as the unscientific ages last. The principle 
of his heroism and nobility has only been developed in new 
force by this opposition. He will have a new degree; he will 
purchase a new patent of it; he will forge himself a new and 
better name, for ' the patricians are called good citizens.' He 
will forget Corioli ; Coriolanus now no more, he will conquer 
Rome, and incorporate that henceforth in his name. He will 
make himself great, not by the grandeur of a true citizenship 
and membership of the larger whole, in his private subjection 
to it, — not by emerging from his particular into the self that 
comprehends the whole; he will make himself great by sub- 
duing the whole to his particular, the greater to the less, the * 
whole to the part. He will triumph over the Common-weal, 
and bind his brow with a new garland. That is his magna- 
nimity. He will take it from without, if they will not let 
him have it within. He will turn against that country, which 
he loved so dearly, that same edge which the Volscian hearts 
have felt so long. ' There's some among you have beheld me 
fighting,' he says. ' Come, try upon yourselves what you have 
seen me? He is only that same narrow, petty, pitiful private 
man he always was, in the city, and in the field, at the head of 
the Roman legions, and in the legislator's chair, when, to right 
his single wrong, or because the people would not let him have 
aZZfrom them, he comes upon the stage at last with Volscian steel, 
and sits down, Captain of the Volscian armies, at Rome's gates. 

' This morning/ says Menenius, after the reprieve, f this 
morning for ten thousand of your throats, I 'd not have given 
a doit.' But this is only the same ' good citizen ' we saw in the 
first scene, who longed to make a quarry of thousands of the 
quartered slaves, as high as he could prick his lance ! That was 
' the altitude of his virtue' then. It is the same citizenship 
with its conditions altered. 

f F 



434 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

So well and thoroughly has the philosopher done his work 
throughout — so completely has he filled the Roman story with 
his ' richer and bolder meanings,' that when the old, familiar 
scene, which makes the denouement of the Roman myth, 
comes out at last in the representation, it comes as the crown- 
ing point of this Poet's own invention. It is but the felici- 
tous artistic consummation of the piece, when this hero, in his 
conflicting passions and instincts, gives at last, to one private 
affection and impulse, the State he would have sacrificed to 
another; when he gives to his boy's prattling inanities, to his 
wife's silence, to the moisture in her eyes, to a shade less on 
her cheek, to the loss of a line there, to his mother's scolding 
eloquence, and her imperious commands, the great city of the 
gods, the city he would have offered up, with all its sanctities, 
with all its household shrines and solemn temples, as one reek- 
ing, smoking holocaust, to his wounded honour. That is the 
principle of the citizenship that was ' accounted GOOD ' when 
this play began, when this play was written. 

' He was a kind of nothing, titleless, — 
Till he had forged himself a name i' the fire 
Of burning Rome? 

That is his modest answer to the military friend who en- 
treats him to spare the city. 

' Though soft-conscienced men may be content to say it ivas 
for his country, he did it to please his mother, and to be part-ly 
proud.' 

Surely that starving citizen who found himself at the 
beginning of this play, 'as lean as a rake' with this hero's legis- 
lation, and in danger of more fatal evils, was not so very wide 
of the truth, after all, in his surmise as to the principles of the 
heroic statesmanship and warfare, when he ventured thus early 
on that suggestion. The State banished him, as an enemy, 
and he came back with a Volscian army to make good that 
verdict. But his sword without was not more cruel than his 
law had been within. It was not starving only that he had 
voted for. 'Let them hang,' ay — {ay) and burn TOO,' was 



VOLUMNIA AND HEK BOY. 435 

\ the disposition ' they had ' thwarted/ — measuring ' the quarry 
of the quartered slaves,' which it would make, 'would the 
nobility but lay aside their ruth.' That was the disposition, 
that was the ignorance, the blind, brutish, demon ignorance, 
that ' in good time ' they had thwarted. They had ruled it 
out and banished it from their city on pain of death, forever; 
they had turned it out in its single impotence, and it came 
back 'armed-' for this was one of rude nature's monarchs, and 
outstretched heroes. 

Yet is he conquered and defeated. The enemy which has 
made war without so long, which has put Corioli and Rome in 
such confusion, has its warfare within also, and it is there that 
the hero is beaten and slain. For there is no state or fixed 
sovereignty in his soul. Both sides of the city rise at once; 
there is a fearful battle, and the red-eyed Mars is dethroned. 
The end which he has pursued at such a cost is within his 
reach at last; but he cannot grasp it. The city lies there 
before him, and his dragon wings encircle it; there is steel 
enough in the claws and teeth now, but he cannot take it. 
For there is no law and no justice of the peace, and no general 
within to put down the conflict of changeful, warring selfs, to, 
suppress the mutiny of mutually opposing, mutually an^ihik 
lating selfish dictates. 

In vain he seeks to make his will immutable; for the. single 
passion has its hour, this * would-do' changes. With, the im- 
pression the passion changes, and the purpose tha^ is passionate 
must alter with it, unless pure obstinacy remain in its place> 
and fulfil the annulled dictate. For such purpose, one person 
of the scientific drama tells us — one who had, had some dramatiQ 
experience in it,— 

* is but the slave to memory, 
Of violent birth, and poor validity, 
Which now, like fruit unripe, stick on the tree, 
But fall unshaken when they mellow be, 
What to ourselves in passion we propose, 
The passion ending doth the purpose lose,'' 

That is Hamlet's verbal account of it, when he undertakes 

ff2 



436 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

to reduce his philosophy to rhyme, and gets the player to insert 
some sixteen of his lines quietly into the court performance: 
that is his verbal account of it; but his action, too, speaks 
louder and more eloquently than his words. 

The principle of identity and the true self is wanting in this 
so-called self-iskness. For the true principle of self is the peace 
principle, the principle of state within and without. 

1 To thine own self be true, 
And it must follow as the night the day, 
Thou canst not then be false to any man! 

That is the doctrine, the scientific doctrine. But it is not 
the passionate, but thoughtful Hamlet, shrinking from blood, 
with his resolution sicklied o'er with the pale cast of conscien- 
tious thought; it is not the humane, conscience-fettered Hamlet, 
but the man who aspires to make his single humours the law 
of the universal world, in whom the poet will show now this 
want of state and sovereignty. 

He steels himself against Cominius; he steels himself against 
Menenius. ( He sits in gold,' Cominius reports, ' his eye red as 
'twould burn Rome' — a small flambeau the poet thinks for 
so large a city. ' He no more remembers his mother than an 
eight year old horse,' is the poor old Menenius querulous 
account of him, when with a cracked heart he returns and 
reports how the conditions of a man are altered in him: but 
while he is making that already-quoted report of this super- 
human growth and assumption of a divine authority and 
honour in the Military Chieftain, the Poet is quietly starting 
a little piece of philosophical machinery that will shake out 
that imperial pageant, and show the slave that is hidden under 
it, for it is no man at all, but, in very deed, a slave, as Hamlet 
calls it,' 'passion's slave,' ' a pipe for fortune's finger to sound 
what stop she please. 1 For that state, — that command — de- 
pends on that which ' changes,' — fortuities, impressions, nay, 
it has the principle of revolution within it. It is its nature to 
change. The single passion cannot engross the large, many- 
passioned, complex nature, so rich and various in motivity, so 



VOLUMNIA AND HER BOT. 437 

large and comprehensive in its surveys — the single passion 
seeks in vain to subdue it to its single end. That reigning 
passion must give way when it is spent, or sooner if its master 
come. You cannot make it look to-day as it looked yesterday; 
you cannot make it look when its rival affection enters as it 
looked when it reigned alone. An hour ago, the hue of reso- 
lution on its cheek glowed immortal red. It was strong enough 
to defy God and all his creatures; it would annul all worlds 
but that one which it was god of. 

This is the speech of it on the lips of the actor who comes 
in to interpret to us the thinkers inaction, the thinker's irreso- 
lution, for ' it is conscience that makes cowards of us all/ 
Here is a man who is resolute enough. His will is not 
' puzzled.' His thoughts, his scruples will not divide and 
destroy his purpose. Here is the unity which precedes 
action. This man is going to be revenged for his father. 
' What would you undertake to do ?' ' To cut his throat i' the 

church.' 

' To hell allegiance, vows to the blackest devil. 
Conscience and grace to the profoundest pit. 
I dare damnation. To this point I stand 
That both the worlds /give to negligence, 
Let come what comes, only I'll be revenged 
Most thoroughly for my father.' [Only.] 

That is your passionate speech, your speech of fire. That 
was what the principle of vindictiveness said when it was you, 
when it mastered you, and called itself by your name. Ay, it 
has many names, and many lips; but it is always one. That 
was what it said an hour ago; and now it is shrunk away you 
know not where, you cannot rally it, and you are there con- 
founded, self-abandoned, self-annulled, a forgery, belying the 
identity which your visible form — which your human form, was 
made to promise, — a slave, — a pipe for fortune's finger. This 
is the kind of action which is criticised in the scientific drama, 
and 'rejected'; and the conclusion after these reviews and 
rejections, ' after every species of rejection,' — the affirmation 
is, that there is but one principle that is human, and that is 
GOOD yesterday, to-day, and for ever; and whoso is true to 



438 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

that is true, in the human form, to the self which was, and 
will be. He cannot then be false to his yesterday, or to- 
morrow ; he cannot then be false to himself; he cannot then be 
false to any man; for that is the self that is one in us all — 
that is the self of reason and conscience, not passion. 

But as for this affection that is tried here now, that the 
diagram of this scene exhibits so tangibly, ' as it were, to the 
eye,' — this poor and private passion, that sits here, with its 
imperial crown on its head, in the place of God, but lacking 
His ' mercy,' — this passion of the petty man, that has made 
itself so hugely visible with its monstrous outstretching, that 
lies stretched out and glittering on these hills, with its dragon 
coils unwound, with its deadly fangs — those little fangs, that 
crush our private hearts, and torture and rend our daily lives 
— exposed in this great solar microscope, striking the common- 
weal, — as for this petty, usurping passion, there is a spectacle 
approaching that will undo it. 

Out of that great city there comes a little group of forms, 
which yesterday this hero ' could not stay to pick out of that 
pile which had offended him,' that was his word, — which 
yesterday he would have burnt in it without a scruple. 
Towards the great Volscian army that beleaguers Rome it 
comes — towards the pavilion where the Volscian captain sits 
in gold, with his wings outspread, it shapes its course. To 
other eyes, it is but a group of Roman ladies, two or three, 
clad in mourning, with their attendants, and a prattling child 
with them ; but, with the first glance at it from afar, the great 
chieftain trembles, and begins to clasp his armour. He could 
think of them and doom them, in his over-mastering passion 
of revenge, with its heroic infinity of mastery triumphant in 
him, — he could think of them and doom them ; but the im- 
pressions of the senses are more vivid, and the passions wait on 
them. As that group draws nearer, one sees, by the light of 
this Poet's painting, a fair young matron, with subdued mien 
and modest graces, and an elder one, leading a wilful boy, with 
a ' confirmed countenance,' pattering by her side; just such a 
group as one might see anywhere in the lordly streets of Pala- 



VOLUMNIA AND HER BOY. 439 

tinus, — much such a one as one might find anywhere under 
those thousand-doomed plebeian roofs. 

But to this usurping ' private/ to this man of passion and 
affection, and not reason — this man of private and particular 
motives only, and blind partial aims, it is more potent than 
Eome and all her claims; it outweighs Rome and all her weal 
— ' it is worth of senators and patricians a city full, of tribunes 
and plebeians a sea and land full ' — it outweighs all the 
Volscians, and their trust in him. 

His reasons of state begin to falter, and change their aspects, 
as that little party draws nearer ; and he finds himself within 
its magnetic sphere. 

For this is the pattern-man, for the man of mere impression 
and instinct. He is full of feeling within his sphere, though 
it is a sphere which does not embrace plebeians, — which crushes 
Volscians with clarions, and drums, and trumpets, and poets' 
voices to utter its exultations. Within that private sphere, his 
sensibilities are exquisite and poetic in their depth and delicacy. 
He is not wanting in the finer impulses, in the nobler affections 
of the particular and private nature. He is not a base, brutal 
man. Even in his martial conquests, he will not take ' leaden 
spoons.' His soul is with a divine ambition fired to have all. 
It is instinct, but it is the instinct of the human ; it is ' con- 
servation with advancement ' that he is blindly pursuing, for 
this is a generous nature. He knows the heights that reason 
lends to instinct in the human kind, and the infinities that 
affection borrows from it. 

And the Poet himself has large and gentle views of ' this 
particular,' scientific views of it, scientific recognitions of its 
laws, such as no philosophic school was ever before able to 
pronounce. Even here, on this sad and tragic ground of a 
subdued and debased common-weal, he will not cramp its 
utterance — he will give it leave to speak, in all its tenderness 
and beauty, in its own sweet native dialect, all its poetic wild- 
ness, its mad verities, its sober impossibilities, even at the 
moment in which he asks in statesmanship for the rational 
motive, undrenched in humours and affections — for the motive 



440 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

of the weal that is common, and not for the motive of that 
which is private and exclusive. 

In vain the hero struggles with his yielding passion, and 
seeks to retain it. In vain he struggles with a sentiment 
which he himself describes as ' a gosling's instinct,' and seeks 
to subdue it. In vain he rallies his pride, and says, ' Let it be 
virtuous to be obstinate ' ; and determines to stand ' as if a man 
were author of himself, and knew no other kin.' His mother 
kneels. It is but a frail, aged woman kneeling to the victorious 
chieftain of the Volscian hosts; but to him it is ' as if Olympus 
to a mole-hill stooped in supplication.' His boy looks at him 
with an eye in which great Nature speaks, and says, ' Deny 
not ' ; he sees the tears in the dove's eyes of the beloved, he 
hears her dewy voice; we hear it, too, through the Poet's art, 
in the words she speaks; and he forgets his part. We reach 
the ' grub ' once more. The dragon wings of armies melt 
from him. He is his young boy's father — he is his fair young 
wife's beloved. 

'O a kiss, long as my exile, sweet as my revenge.' 

There's no decision yet. The scales are even now. But there 
is another there, waiting to be saluted, and he himself is but a 
boy — his own mother's boy again, at her feet. It- is she that 
schools and lessons him; it is she that conquers him. It was 
1 her boy,' after all — it was her boy still, that was * coming 
home.' 

Well might Menenius say — 

* This Volumnia is worth of consuls, senators, patricians, 
A city full ; of tribunes such as you, 
A sea and land full.' 

But let us take the philosophic report of this experiment as 
we find it; for on the carefullest study, when once it is put in 
its connections, when once we ' have heard the argument,' we 
shall not find anything in it to spare. But we must not forget 
that this is still ' the election,' the ignorant election of the 
common- weal which is under criticism, and though this elec- 
tion has been revoked in the play already, and this is a banished 



VOLUMNIA AND HER BOY. 44 1 

man we are trying here, there was a play in progress when 
this play was played, in which that revocation was yet to 
come off; and this Poet was anxious that the subject should 
be considei^ed first from the most comprehensive grounds, so 
that the principle of ' the election ' need never again be called in 
question, so that the revolution should end in the state, and 
not in the principle of revolution. 

' My wife comes foremost ; then the honoured mould 
Wherein this trunk was framed, and in her hand 
The grand-child to her blood. But, out, affection ! 
All bond and privilege of nature, break ! 
Let it be virtuous to be obstinate. — 
What is that curtsey worth ? or those doves' eyes, 
Which can make gods forsworn ? — 

['He speaks of the people as if he were a god to punish, 
and not a man of infirmity/] 

' I melt, and am not 
Of stronger earth than others. — My mother bows ; 
As if Olympus to a molehill should 
In supplication nod : and my young boy 
Hath an aspect of intercession, which 
Great Nature cries, ' Deny not !' — Let the Volsces 
Plough Rome, and harrow Italy ; I'll never 
Be such a gosling to obey instinct ; but stand, 
As if a man were author of himself, 
And knew no other kin. 
These eyes are not the same I wore in Rome. 
Vir. The sorrow that delivers us thus changed, 
Makes you think so. 

[The objects are altered, not the eyes. We are changed. 
But it is with sorrow. She bids him note that alteration, and 
puts upon it the blame of his loss of love. But that is just 
the kind of battery he is not provided for. His resolution 
wavers. That unrelenting warrior, that fierce revengeful man 
is gone already, and forgot to leave his part — the words he 
was to speak are wanting.] 

Cor Like a dull actor now, 

I have forgot my part, and I am out, 
Even to a full disgrace. Best of my flesh, 



442 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

Forgive my tyranny ; but do not say, 
For that, Forgive our Romans. — 0, a kiss 
Long as my exile, sweet as my revenge ! 
Now by the jealous queen of heaven, that kiss 
I carried from thee, dear ; and my true lip 
Hath virgin'd it e'er since. — You gods ! I prate, 
And the most noble mother of the world 
Leave unsaluted : Sink, my knee, Hthe earth ; [Kneels."] 
Of the deep duty* more impression show 
Than that of common sons. 
Vol. O, stand up bless' d ! 

Whilst, with no softer cushion than the flint, 
I kneel before thee ; and unproperly 
Show duty, as mistaken — 

[Note i + — ' as mistaken,' for this is the kind of learning de- 
scribed elsewhere, which differs from received opinions, and 
must, therefore, pray in aid of similes.] 

— and unproperly 
Show duty, as mistaken all the while 
Between the child and parent. 

[And the prostrate form of that which should command, is 
represented in the kneeling mother. The Poet himself points 
us to this hieroglyphic. It is the common-weal that kneels in 
her person, and the rebel interprets for us. It is the violated 
law that stoops for pardon.] 

Cor. "What is this ? 

Your knees to me ? to your corrected son 1 
Then let the pebbles on the hungry beach 
Fillip the stars ; then let the mutinous winds 
Strike the proud cedars 'gainst the fiery sun ; 
Murdering impossibility, to make 
What cannot be, slight work. 

Vol. Thou art my warrior ; 

Iholp to frame thee. 

[But it is not of the little Marcius only, the hero — the 
Roman hero in germ — that she speaks — there is more than 
her Roman part here, when she adds — ] 

* This is the Poet who says, ' instinct is a great matter.' 



VOLUMNIA AND HER BOY. 443 

Vol. This is a poor epitome of yours, 

Which by the interpretation oifull time 
May show, like all, yourself. 

[And hear now what benediction the true hero can dare to 
utter, what prayer the true hero can dare to pray, through 
this faltering, fluctuating, martial hero's lips, when, ' that what- 
soever god who led him ' is failing him, and the flaws of im- 
pulse are swaying him to and fro, and darkening him for 
ever.] 

Cor. ' The god of soldiers 

With the consent of supreme Jove,' — [the Capitolian, the 

god of state] ' inform 

Thy thoughts with nobleness ;' — [inform thy thoughts.'] 

' that thou may'st prove 
The shame unvulnerable, and stick i'the wars 
Like a great sea-mark, standing every flaw, 
And saving those that eye thee.' 

[But this hero's conclusion for himself, and his impulsive 
nature is — ] 

' Not of a woman's tenderness to be, 
Requires nor child, nor woman's face to see. 
I have sat too long.' 

But the mother will not let him go, and her stormy elo- 
quence completes the conquest which that dumb rhetoric had 
before well nigh achieved. 

Yes, Menenius was right in his induction. His abstraction 
and brief summing up of ' this Volumnia' and her history, is the 
true one. She is very potent in the business of the state, 
whether you take her in her first literal acceptation, as the 
representative mother, or whether you take her in that sym- 
bolical and allusive comprehension, to which the emphasis on 
the name is not unfrequently made to point, as ' the nurse 
and mother of all humanities,' the instructor of the state, the 
former of its nobility, who irc-forms their thoughts with 
nobleness, such nobleness, and such notions of it as they have, 
and who fits them for the place they are to occupy in the 
body of the common-weal. 



444 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

Menenius has not exaggerated in His exposition the relative 
importance of this figure among those which the dumb-show 
of this play exhibits. Among the ' transient hieroglyphics' 
which the diseased common-weal produces on the scientific 
stage, when the question of its CURE is the question of the 
Play — in that great crowd of forms, in that moving, porten- 
tous, stormy pageant of senators, and consuls, and tribunes, 
and plebeians, whose great acts fill the scene — there are none 
more significant than these two, whom we saw at first ' seated 
on two low stools, sewing'; these two of the wife and mother 
— the commanding mother, and the ' gracious silence.' 

' This Volumnia' — yes, let her school him, for it is from 
her school that he has come: let her conquer him, for she is 
the con server of this harm. It is she who makes of it a tradi- 
tion. To its utmost bound of consequences, she is the mother 
of it, and accountable to God and man for its growth and con- 
tinuance. Consuls, and senators, and patricians, and tribunes, 
such as we have, are powerless without her, are powerless 
against her. The state begins with her; but, instead of it, 
she has bred and nursed the destroyer of the state. Let her 
conquer him, though her life-blood must flow for it now. 
This play is the Cure of the Common-weal, the convulsed and 
dying Common-weal; and whether the assault be from within 
or without, this woman must undo her work. The tribunes 
have sent for her now : she must go forth without shrinking, 
and slay her son. She was the true mother; she trained him 
for the common-weal, she would have made a patrician of 
him, but that craved a noble cunning; she was not instructed 
in it ; she must pay the penalty of her ignorance — the penalty 
of her traditions — and slay him now. There is no help for 
it, for she has made with her traditions a thing that no com- 
mon-weal can bear. 

Woe for this Volumnia ! Woe for the common-weal whose 
chiefs she has reared, whose great men and ' GOOD citizens ' 
she has made ! Woe for her ! Woe for the common- weal, for 
her boy approaches ! The land is groaning and shaken ; the 
faces of men gather blackness; the clashing of arms is heard 



VOLUMNIA AND HER BOY. 445 

in the streets, blood is flowing, the towns are blazing. Great 
Rome will soon be sacked with Romans, for her boy is coming 
home ; the child of her instinct, the son of her ignorance, the 
son of her religion, is coming home. 

1 O mother, mother ! 
What hast thou done ? . . . . 

my mother, mother ! 0, 
You have won a happy victory to Rome, — 
But for your son ' 

Alas for him, and his gentle blood, and noble breeding, and 
his patrician greatness ! Woe for the unlearned mother's son, 
who has made him great with such a training, that Rome's 
weal and his, Rome's greatness and his, must needs contend 
together — that ' Rome's happy victory' must needs be the 
blaze that shall darken him for ever ! 

Yet he storms again, with something like his old patrician 
fierceness; and yet not that, the tone is altered; he is humbler 
and tamer than he was, and he says himself, l It is the first 
time that ever I have learned to scold'; but he is stung, even 
to boasting of his old heroic deeds, when Aufidius taunts him 
with his un-martial, nn-divine infirmity, and brings home to 
him in very words, at last, the Poet's suppressed verdict, the 
Poet's deferred sentence, Guilty! — of what? He is but 
A boy, his nurse's boy, and he undertook the state ! He is 
but A slave, and he was caught climbing to the imperial 
chair, and putting on the purple. He is but ' a dog to the 
commonalty,' and he was sitting in the place of God. 

Aufidius owns, indeed, to his own susceptibility to these 

particular and private affections. When Coriolanus turns to 

him after that appeal from Volumnia has had its effect, and 

asks : — 

' Now, good Aufidius, 
Were you in my stead, say, would you have heard 
A mother less, or granted less, Aufidius V 

He answers, guardedly, ' I was moved withaV But the philo- 
sopher has his word there, too, as well as the Poet, slipped in 
under the Poet's, covertly, ' I was moved with-a//.' [It is the 



446 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

Play of the Common-weal.] And what should the single 
private man, the man of exclusive affections and changeful 
humours, do with the weal of the whole? In his noblest con- 
ditions, what business has he in the state? and who shall vote 
to give him the out-stretched wings and claws of Volscian 
armies, that he may say of Home, all's mine, and give it to his 
wife or mother? Who shall follow in his train, to plough 
Rome and harrow Italy, who lays himself and all his forces at 
his mother's feet, and turns back at her word? 

Aufidius. You lords and heads of the state, perfidiously 

Has he betrayed your business, and given up 

For certain drops of salt, your city Rome — 

I say, your city — to his wife and mother : 

Breaking his oath and resolution like 

A twist of rotten silk ; never admitting 

Counsel of the war, but at his nurse's tears 

He whined and roar'd away your victory, 

That pages blushed at him, and men of heart 

Looked wondering at each other.* 
Cor. Hear'st thou, Mars? 

Auf. Name not the god thou Boy of tears. 
Cor. Ha ! 

Auf. No more. [You are no more.] 
Cor. Measureless liar, thou hast made my heart 

Too great for what contains it. Boy ? Slave ! 

.... Boy 1 False hound /' 

[These are the names that are flying about here, now that 

the martial chiefs are criticising each other: it is no matter 

which side they go.] 

' Boy ? slave / 
. . . Boy 1 False hound ! [' He is a very dog to the com- 
monalty.'] 
Alone I did it. Boy?' 

But it is Volumnia herself who searches to the quick the 
principle of this boyish sovereignty, in her satire on the un- 
divine passion she wishes to unseat. It is thus that she 
upbraids the hero with his unmanly, ungracious, ignoble 
purpose : — 

* There is a look which has come down to us. That is Elizabethan. 
That is the suppressed Elizabethan. 



VOLUMNIA AND HER BOY. 447 

' Speak to me, son. 
Thou hast affected the fine strains of honour, 
To imitate the graces of the gods ; 
To tear with thunder the wide cheeks o' the air, 
And yet to charge thy sulphur with a bolt 
That should but rive an oak. Why dost not speak 1 
Think'st thou it honourable for a noble man 
Still to remember wrongs T 

For that is the height of the scientific affirmation also; the 
other was, in scientific language, its ' anticipation.' He wants 
nothing of a god but an eternity, and a heaven to throne in 
(slight deficiences in a god already). ' Yes, mercy, if you paint 
him truly.' ' I paint him in character/ 

Nobility, honour, manliness, heroism, good citizen- 
ship, freedom, divinity, patriotism. We are getting a 
number of definitions here, vague popular terms, scientifically 
fixed, scientifically cleared, destined to waver, and be con- 
fused and mixed with other and fatally different things, in the 
popular apprehension no more — when once this science is 
unfolded for that whole people for whom it was delivered — 
no more for ever. 

There is no open dramatic embodiment in this play of the 
true ideal nobility, and manliness, and honour, and divinity. 
This is the false affirmation which is put upon the stage here, 
to be tried, and examined, and rejected. For it is to this Poet's 
purpose to show — and very much to his purpose to show, 
sometimes — what is not the true affirmation. His method is 
critical, but his rejection contains the true definition. The 
whole play is contrived to shape it here; all hands combine to 
frame it. Volscians and Romans conspire to pronounce it; 
the world is against this ' one man' and his part-liness, though 
he be indeed ' every man.' He himself has been compelled to 
pronounce it; for the speaker for the whole is the speaker in 
each of us, and pronounces his sentences on ourselves with our 
own lips. ' Being gentle wounded craves a noble cunning,' is 
the word of the noble, who comes back with a Volscian army 
to exhibit upon the stage this grand hieroglyphic, this grand 
dramatic negative of that nobility. 



448 THE CURE OP THE COMMON-WEAL. 

But it is from the lips of the mother, brought into this 
deadly antagonism with the manliness she has trained, com- 
pelled now to echo that popular rejection, that the Poet can 
venture to speak out, at last, from the depths of his true hero- 
ism. It is this Volumnia who strikes now to the heart of the 
play with her satire on this affectation of the graces of the 
gods, — this assumption of nobility, and manliness, and the 
fine strains of honour, — in one who is led only by the blind de- 
mon gods, ' that keep this dreadful pother o'er our heads,' — 
in one who is bounded and shut in after all to the range of 
his own poor petty private passions, shut up to a poverty of 
soul which forbids those assumptions, limited to a nature in 
which those strictly human terms can be only affectations, one 
who concentrates all his glorious special human gifts on the 
pursuit of ends for which the lower natures are also furnished. 
Honour, forsooth ! the fine strains of honour 1 , and the graces 
of the gods. Look at that Volscian army there. 

' To tear with thunder the wide cheeks o' the air, 
And yet to charge thy sulphur with a bolt 
That should but rive an oak. 

Why dost not speak ? ' 

He can not. There is no speech for that. It does not 

bear review. 

' Why dost not speak 1 
Think'st thou it honourable for a noble man 
Still to remember wrongs ? ' 

' Let it be virtuous to be obstinate? let there be no better 
principle of that identity which we insist on in men, that firm- 
ness which we call manliness, and the cherished wrong is 
honour. 

— ? It is but an interrogative point, but the height of our 
affirmation is taken with it. It is a figure of speech and inten- 
sifies the affirmative with its irony. 

' This a consul ] No.' 
' No more, but e'en a woman, and commanded 
By such poor passion as the maid that milks, 
And does the meanest chares.' [Queen.] 
' Give me that man that is not passion's slave. 



VOLUMNIA AND HER BOY. 449 

Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice, 
And could of men distinguish her election, 
She hath seal'd tliee for herself: for thou hast been 
As one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing. 

But the man who rates so highly ' this single mould of Mar- 
cius,' and the wounded name of it, that he will forge another 
for it ' \ the fire of burning Rome,' who will hurt the world 
to ease the rankling of his single wrong, who will plough 
Some and harrow Italy to cool the fever of his thirst for ven- 
geance; this is not the man, this is not the hero, this is not THE 
GOD, that the scientific review accepts. Whoso has put him 
in the chair of state on earth, or in heaven, must ' revoke that 
ignorant election/ Whatever our ' perfect example in civil 
life ' may be, and we are, perhaps, not likely to get it openly 
in the form of an historic ' composition ' on this author's stage, 
whatever name and shape it may take when it comes, this evi- 
dently is not it. This Caius Marcius is dismissed for the pre- 
sent from this Poet's boards. This curule chair that stands 
here empty yet, for aught that we can see, and this crown of 
' olives of endless age,' is not for him. 

' "Would you proceed especially against Caius Marcius 1 
Against him first. 

' We proceed first by negatives, and conclude after every 
species of rejection.' 

On the surface of this play, lies everywhere the question of 
the Common- Weal, in its relation to the good that is private 
and particular, scientifically reviewed, as a question in propor- 
tion, — as the question of the whole against the part, — of the 
greater against the less, — nay, as the question of that which is 
asrainst that which is not. For it is a treatment which throws 
in passing, the shadow of the old metaphysical suspicion and 
scepticism on that chaotic unaxiomatical condition of things 
which the scientific eye discovers here, for the new philosophy 
with all its new comprehension of the actual, with all its new 
convergency on practice, is careful to inform us that it ob- 
serves, notwithstanding the old distinction between f being 
and becoming/ This is an ideal philosophy also, though the 

G G 



450 THE CURE OP THE COMMON-WEAL. 

notions of nature are more* respected in it, than the sponta- 
neous unconsidered notions of men. 

It is the largeness of the objective whole, the historic whole 
and the faculty in man of comprehending it, and the sense 
of relation and obligation to it, as the highest historic law, — 
the formal, the essential law of kind in him, it is the breadth of 
reason, it is the circumference of conscience, it is the grandeur 
of duty which this author arrays here scientifically against 
that oblivion and ignoring of the whole, that forgetfulness of the 
world, and the universal tie which the ignorance of the unaided 
sense and the narrowness of passion and private affection create, 
whether in the one, or the few, or the many. It is the Weal of the 
whole against the will of the part, no matter where the limit of 
that partiality, or 'partliness,' as the '■poor citizen ' calls it, is fixed 
whether it be the selfishness of the singleself, or whether the house- 
hold tie enlarges its range, whether it be the partiality of class or 
faction, or the partiality of kindred or race, or the partiality of geo- 
graphic limits, the question of the play, the question of the whole, 
of the worthier whole, is still pursued with scientific exaction. It 
is the conflict with axioms which is represented here, and not 
with wordy axioms only, not with abstractions good for the 
human mind only, in its abstract self-sustained speculations, but 
with historical axioms, axioms which the universal nature knows, 
laws which have had the consent of things since this nature 
began, laws which passed long ago the universal commons. 

It is the false unscientific state which is at war, not with 
abstract speculation merely, but with the nature of things and 
the received logic of the universe, which this man of a practi- 
cal science wishes to call attention to. It is the crowning and 
enthroning of that which is private and particular, it is the 
anointing of passion and instinct, it is the arming of the abso- 
lute — the demon — will; it is the putting into the hands of 
the ignorant part the sceptre of the whole, which strikes the 
scientific Reviewer as the thing to be noted here. And by 
way of proceeding by negatives first, he undertakes to convey 
to others the impression which this state of things makes upon 
his own mind, as pointedly as may be, consistently with those 



VOLUMNIA AND HER BOY. 45 1 

general intentions which determine his proceedings and the 
conditions which limit them, and he is by no means timid in 
availing himself of the capabilities of his story to that end. 
The true spectacle of the play, — the principal hieroglyphic of 
it, — the one in which this hieroglyphic criticism approaches the 
metaphysical intention most nearly, is one that requires inter- 
pretation. It does not report itself to the eye at once. The show- 
man stops to tell us before he produces it, that it is a symbol, — 
that this is one of the places where he ' prays in aid of similes,' — 
that this is a specimen of what he calls elsewhere 'allusive' writing. 
The true spectacle of the play, — the grand hieroglyphic of it, — 
is that view of the city, and the woman in the foreground kneeling 
for it, * to her son, her corrected son/ begging for pardon of her 
corrected rebel — hanging for life on the chance of his changeful 
moods and passions. It is Rome that lies stretched out there 
upon her hills, in all her visible greatness and claims to rever- 
ence; it is Rome with her Capitolian crown, forth from which 
the Roman matron steps, and with no softer cushion than the 
flint, in the dust at the rebel's feet, kneels ' to show ' — as she 
tells us — to show as clearly as the conditions of the exhibition 
allow it to be exhibited, duty as mistaken, — ' as mistaken/ 
— all the while between the child and parent.' 

It is Jupiter that stoops; it is Olympus doing obeisance to 
the mole-hill; it is the divineness of the universal law — the 
formal law in man — that is prostrate and suppliant in her 
person; and the Poet exhausts even his own powers of ex- 
pression, and grows inarticulate at last, in seeking to convey 
his sense of this ineffable, impossible, historical pretension. 
It is as ' if Olympus to a mole-hill should in supplication nod; 
it is as if the pebbles on the hungry beach should fillip the stars; 
as if the mutinous winds should strike the proud cedars against 
the fiery sun, murdering impossibility, to make what can not be, 
slight work/ — what can not be. 

That was the spectacle of the play, and that was the world's 
spectacle when the play was written. Nay, worse; a thousand- 
fold more wild and pitiful, and confounding to the intellect, 
and revolting to its sensibilities, was the spectacle that the 

G G 2 



452 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

State offered then to the philosophic eye. The Poet has all 
understated his great case. He has taken the pattern-man in 
the private affections, the noble man of mere instinct and 
passion, and put him in the chair of state; — the man whom 
nature herself had chosen and anointed, and crowned with 
kingly graces. 

' As waves before a vessel under sail 
So men obeyed him, and fell below his stern.' 

' If he would but incline to the people, there never was a 
worthier man.' 

Not to the natural private affections and instincts, touched 
with the nobility of human sense, — not to the loyalty of the 
husband, — not to the filial reverence and duty of the son, 
true to that private and personal relationship at least; not to 
the gentleness of the patrician, true to that private patrician- 
ship also, must England owe her weal — such weal as she 
could beg and wheedle from her lord and ruler then. Not 
from the conquering hero with his fresh oakleaf on his brow, 
and the command of the god who led him in his speech and 
action, — and not from his lineal successor merely, must 
England beg her welfare then. It was not the venerable 
mother, or the gentle wife, with her dove's eyes able to make 
gods of earth forsworn, who could say then, ' The laws of 
England are at my commandment.' 

Crimes that the historic pen can only point to, — not re- 
cord, — low, illiterate, brutish stupidities, mad-cap folly, and 
wanton extravagancies and caprices, in their ideal impersona- 
tions, — these were the gods that England, in the majesty of her 
State, in the sovereignty of her chartered weal, must abase 
herself to then. To the vices of tyranny, to low companions 
and their companions, and their kindred, the State must 
cringe and kneel then. To these, — men who meddled with 
affairs of State, — who took, even at such a time, the State to 
be their business, — must address themselves; for these were the 
councils in which England's peace and war were settled then, 
and the Tribune could enter them only in disguise. His veto 
could not get spoken outright, it could only be pronounced in 



METAPHYSICAL AID. 453 

under-tones and circumlocutions. Not with noble, eloquent, 
human appeals, could the soul of power be reached and con- 
quered then — the soul of him ' within whose eyes sat twenty 
thousand deaths/ the man of the thirty legions, to whom this 
argument must be dedicated. 'Ducking observances,' basest 
flatteries, sycophancies past the power of man to utter, personal 
humiliations, and prostrations that seemed to teach ' the mind a 
most inherent baseness,' these were the weapons, — the required 
weapons of the statesman's warfare then. From these ' dogs 
of the commonalty/ men who were indeed ' noble,' whose 
'fame' did indeed 'fold in the orb o' the world,' must take 
then, as a purchase or a gift, deliverance from physical re- 
straint, and life itself. These were the days when England's 
victories were ' blubbered and whined away,' in such a sort, that 
'pages blushed at it, and men of heart looked wondering at 
each other/ 

And, when science began first to turn her eye on history, 
and propose to herself the relief of the human estate, as her 
end, and the scientific arts as her means, this was the spectacle 
she found herself expected to endure; this was the state of 
things she found herself called upon to sanction and conserve. 
She could not immediately reform it — she must produce first 
her doctrine of ' true forms,' her scientific definitions and pre- 
cepts based on them, and her doctrine of constructions. She 
could not openly condemn it; but she could criticise and 
reject it by means of that method which is ' sometimes neces- 
sary in the sciences,' and to which ' those who would let in new 
light upon the human mind must have recourse.' She could 
seize the grand hieroglyphic of the heroic past, and make it 
' point with its finger ' that which was unspeakable, — her 
scorn of it. She could borrow the freedom of the old Roman 
lips, to repronounce, in her own new dialect, — not their anti- 
cipation of her veto only, but her eternal affirmation, — the 
word of her consulship, the rule of her nobility, — the nobility 
of being, — being in the human, — the nobility of manliness, — 
the divinity of State, the true doctrine of it; — 'and, to speak 
truly, ' Antiquitas seculi, juventus mundV. 



454 THE CURE OF THE COMMON WEAL. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

METAPHYSICAL AID. 

' I do not like the fashion of your garments. You will say they 
are Persian attire ; but let them be changed.' — 

The King to Tom o' Bedlam. 

' Would you proceed especially against Caius Marcius ? 
Against him first.' 

TT is the cure of the Common-weal which this author has 
•*■ undertaken, for he found himself pre-elected to the care 
of the people and to the world's tribuneship. But he handles 
his subject in the natural, historical order, in the chronological 
order, — and not here only, but in that play of which this is a 
part, — of which this is the play within the Play, — in that 
grand, historical proceeding on the world's theatre, which it 
was given to the author of this play to institute. 

He begins with the physical wants of men. The hunger, 
and cold, and weariness, and all the physical suffering and 
destitution of that human condition which is the condition of 
the many, has arrested his human eye, with its dumb, patient 
eloquence, and it is that which makes the starting point of his 
revolution. He translates its mute language, he anticipates its 
word. He is setting in movement operations that are intended 
to make ' coals cheap' ; he proposes to have corn at his own 
price. He has so much confidence in what his tongue can do 
in the way of flattery, that he expects to come back beloved of 
all the trades in Rome. He will ' cog their hearts from them,' 
and get elected consul yet, with all their voices. 

' Scribbling seems to be the sign of a disordered age,' says the 
philosopher, who finds so much occasion for the use of that art 
about these days. ' It seems as if it were the season for vain 
things when the hurtful oppress us; in a time when doing ill 



METAPHYSICAL AID. 455 

is common, to do nothing but what signifies nothing is a kind 
of commendation. 'Tis my comfort that I shall be one of the 
last that are called in question ; and, whilst the greater offend- 
ers are calling to account, I shall have leisure to amend ; for it 
would be unreasonable to punish the less troublesome, whilst we 
are infested with the greater. As the physician said to one 
who presented him his finger to dress, and who, he perceived, 
had an ulcer in his lungs, ' Friend,' said he, ' it is not now 
time to concern yourself about your fmgers'-ends'. And yet 
— [and yet\ — I saw, some years ago, a person whose name and 
memory I have in very great esteem, in the very height of 
our great disorders, when there was neither law nor justice put 
in execution, nor magistrate that performed his office — no more 
than there is now — ^publish, I know not what pitiful reforma- 
tions, about clothes, cookery, and law chicanery. These are 
amusements wherewith to feed a people that are ill-used, to 
show that they are not totally forgotten^ 

That is the account of it. That is the history of this inno- 
vation, beginning with books, proposing pitiful reformations 
in clothes, and cookery, and law chicanery. That would serve 
to show an ill-used people that there was some care for them 
stirring, some tribuneship at work already. ' What I say of 
physic generally, may serve AS AN EXAMPLE OF all other 
SCIENCES,' says this same scribbler, under his scribbling cog- 
nomen. ' We certainly intend to comprehend them all,' says 
the graver authority, ' such as Ethics, Politics, and Logic' 

That is, where we are exactly in this so entertaining per- 
formance, which was also designed for the benefit of an ill- 
used people; for this candidate for the chief magistracy is the 
JEdile also, and while he stands for his place these spectacles 
will continue. 

It is that physical suffering of ' the poor citizens' that he 
begins with here. Is is the question of the price of corn with 
which he opens his argument. The dumb and patient people 
are on his stage already; dumb and patient no longer, but 
clamoring against the surfeiting and wild wanton waste of the 
few; clamoring for their share in God's common gifts to men, 



456 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

and refusing to take any longer the portion which a diseased 
state puts down for them. But he tells us from the outset, 
that this claim will be prosecuted in such a manner as to 
' throw forth greater themes for insurrection's arguing.' 

Though all the wretched poor were clothed and fed with 
imperial treasure, with imperial luxury and splendour — though 
all the arts which are based on the knowledge of physical 
causes should be put in requisition to relieve their need — 
though the scientific discoveries and inventions which are 
pouring in upon human life from that field of scientific inquiry 
which our men of science have already cultivated their 
golden harvests, should reach at last poor Tom himself — 
though that scientific movement now in progress should pro- 
ceed till it has reached the humblest of our human kin, and 
surrounded him with all the goods of the private and particular 
nature, with the sensuous luxuries and artistic elegancies and 
refinements of the lordliest home — that good which is the 
distinctive human good, that good which is the constitutional 
human end, that good, that formal and essential good, which 
it is the end of this philosophy to bring to man, would not 
necessarily be realised. 

For that, and nothing short ot that, the ' advancement' of 
the species to that which it is blindly reaching for, painfully 
groping for — its form in nature, its ideal perfection — the 
advancement of it to something more noble than the nobility 
of a nobler kind of vermin — a state which involves another 
kind of individual growth and greatness, one which involves 
a different, a distinctively ' human principle ' and tie of con- 
gregation, is that which makes the ultimate intention of this 
philosophy. 

The organization of that large, complex, difficult form in 
nature, in which the many are united in i the greater congrega- 
tion' ; that more extensive whole, of which the units are each, 
not simple forms, but the complicated, most highly complex, 
and not yet subdued complexity, which the individual form of 
man in itself constitutes; this so difficult result of nature's 
combinations and her laws of combination, labouring, strug- 



METAPHYSICAL AID. 457 

gling towards its consummation, but disordered, threatened, 
convulsed, asking aid of art, is the subject; the cure of it, the 
cure and healthful regimen of it, the problem. 

And it is a born doctor who has taken it in hand this time ; 
one of your natural geniuses, with an inward vocation for the 
art of healing, instructed of nature beforehand in that mystery 
and profession, and appointed of her to that ministry. 
Wherever you find him, under whatever disguise, you will 
find that his mind is running on the structure of bodies, the 
means of their conservation and growth, and the remedies for 
their disorders, and decays, and antagonisms, without and 
within. He has a most extraordinary and incurable natural 
bent and determination towards medicine and cures in general; 
he is always inquiring into the anatomy of things and the 
qualities of drugs, analysing them and mixing them, finding 
the art of their compounds, and modifying them to suit his 
purposes, or inventing new ones; for, like Aristotle, to whom 
he refers for a precedent, he wishes c to have a hand in every- 
thing.' 

But he is not a quack. He has no respect for the old autho- 
ritative prescriptions, if they fail in practice, whether they 
come in Galen's name, or another's; but he is just as severe 
upon ' the empiricutics,' on the other hand, and he objects to 
' a horse-drench' for the human constitution in the greater con- 
gregation, as much as he does in that distinctively complex and 
delicate structure which the single individual human frame in 
itself constitutes. 

Menenius [speaking of the letter which Yolumnia has told 
him of, and putting in a word on this Doctor's behalf, for it is 
not very much to the purpose on his own] says, ' It gives me 
an estate of seven years' health, during which time I will make a 
lip at the physician.' A lip — a lip — and ' what a deal of scorn 
looks beautiful on it,' when once you get to see it. But this 
is the play of ' conservation with advancement.' It is the cure 
and preservation of the common-weal, to which all lines are 
tending, to which all points and parentheses are pointing ; and 
thus he continues: ' The most sovereign prescription in Galen 



458 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

is but empiricutic, and to this preservative of no better report 
than a horse-drench.' So we shall find, when we come to try 
it — this preservative, — this conservation. 

This Doctor has a great opinion of nature. He thinks that 
' the physician must rely on her powers for his cures in the last 
resort, and be able to make prescriptions of them, instead of 
making them out of his own pre-conceits, if he would not 
have of his cure a conceit also. 1 His opinion is, that ' nature 
is made better by no mean, but she herself hath made that 
mean;' — 

' So o'er that art 
Which you say adds to nature, is an art 

That nature makes 

This is an art 

Which does mend nature, change it rather : but 
The art itself is nature.' 

That is the Poet's view, but the Philosopher is of the same 
opinion. ' Man while operating can only apply or withdraw natu- 
ral bodies, nature 'mtem&Wy performs the rest.' Those who become 
practically versed in nature are the mechanic, the mathema- 
tician, the alchemist, and the magician, but all, as matters now 

stand with faint efforts and meagre success.' 'The 

syllogism forces assent and not things.'' 

' The subtlety of nature is far beyond that of sense or of the 
understanding. The syllogism consists of propositions, these of 
words, words are the signs of notions, notions represent things. 
If our notions are fantastical, the whole structure falls to the 
ground; but they are for the most part improperly abstracted 
and deduced from things! 

There is the whole of it; there it is in a nut-shell. As we 
are very apt to find it in this method of delivery by aphorisms ; 
there is the shell of it at least. And considering ' the tortui'e 
and press of the method,' and the instruments of torture then 
in use for correcting the press, on these precise questions, 
there is as much of the kernel, perhaps, as could reasonably be 
looked for, in those particular aphorisms; and c aphorisms re- 
presenting a knowledge broken, do invite men to inquire fur- 
ther;' so this writer of them tells us. 



METAPHYSICAL AID. 459 

With all his reliance on nature then, and with all his scorn 
of the impracticable and arrogant conceits of learning as he 
finds it, and of the quackeries that are practised in its name, this 
is no empiric. He will not approach that large, complex, ela- 
borate combination of nature, that laboured fruit of time, — 
her most subtle and efficacious agent, so prolific in results that 
amaze and confound our art, — he will not approach this great 
structure with all its unperceived interior adaptations, — with 
so much of nature's own work in it, — he has too much respect 
for her own ' cunning hand,' to approach it without learning, 
— to undertake its cure with blind ignorant experiments. He 
will not go to work in the dark on this structure, with drug or 
surgery. This is going to be a scientific cure. ' Before we 
proceed any further, hear me speak.' He will inquire before- 
hand the nature of this particular structure that he proposes to 
meddle with, and get its normal state defined at the outset. 
But that will take him into the question of structures in gene- 
ral, as they appear in nature, and the intention of nature in 
them. He will have a comparative anatomy to help him. 
This analysis will not stop with the social unit, he will ana- 
lyze him. It will not stop with him. It will comprehend the 
principles of all combinations. He will not stop in his analy- 
sis of this complexity till he comes to that which precedes all 
combination, and survives it — the original simplicity of nature. 
He will come to this cure armed with the universal ' simples f he 
will have all the original powers of nature, ' which are not 
many,' in his hands, to begin with ; and he will have more 
than that. He will have the doctrine of their combinations, 
not in man only, but in all the kinds; — those despised kinds, 
that claim such close relationship — such wondrous relation- 
ship with man ; and he will not go to the primitive instinctive 
nature only for his knowledge on this point. He will inquire 
of art, — the empiric art, — and rude accident, what latent effi- 
cacies they have detected in her, what churlish secrets of hers 
they have wrung from her. You will find the gardener's and 
the farmer's reports, and not the physician's and the surgeon's 
only, inserted in his books of policy and ethics. The 'nettles' 



460 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

theory of the rights of private life, and his policy of foreign 
relationships, appears to this learned politician to strengthen 
his case a little, and the pertinacious refusal of the ' old crab 
trees ' to lend their organizations, such as they are, to the fruc- 
tification of a bud of nobler kind, is quoted with respect as a 
decision of nature in another court, on this same question, 
which is one of the questions here. For the principle of con- 
servation as well as the other pi'inciples of the human conduct, 
appears to this philosopher to require a larger treatment than 
our men of learning have given it hitherto. 

And this is the man of science who takes so much pains to 
acknowledge his preference for ' good compositions, 1 — who 
thinks so much of good natural compositions and their virtues, 
who is always expressing or betraying his respect for the happy 
combinations, the sound results, the luxuriant and beautiful 
varieties with which natui'e herself illustrates the secret of her 
fertility, and publishes her own great volume of examples in 
the Arts. 

First it is the knowledge of the simple forms into which all 
the variety of nature is convertible, the definitions which ac- 
count for all — that which is always the same in all the differ- 
ence, that which is always permanent in all the change; first it 
is the doctrine of ' those simple original forms, or differences of 
things, which like the alphabet are not many, the degrees and 
co-ordinations whereof make all this variety,' and then it is the 
doctrine of their combinations, — the combinations which nature 
has herself accomplished, those which the arts have accom- 
plished, and those which are possible, which have not been ac- 
complished, — those which the universal nature working in 
the human, working in each, from the platform of the human, 
from that height in her ascending scale of species, dictates 
now, demands, — divinely orders, — divinely instructs us in. 

This, and nothing short of this, — this so radical knowledge, 
reaching from the summit of the human complexity, to the pri- 
mEeval depths of nature, — to the simplicity of the nature that 
is one in all, — to the indissoluble laws of being, — the laws of 
being in the species, — the law with which the specific law is 



METAPHYSICAL AID. 46 1 

convertible, — the law which cannot be broken in the species, 
which involves loss of species, — loss of being in the species, — this 
so large and rich and various knowledge, comprehending all the 
varieties of nature in its fields, putting all nature under contri- 
bution for its results, this — this is the knowledge with which 
the man of science approaches now, this grand particular. 

The reader who begins to examine for himself, for the first 
time, in the original books of it, this great system of the Mo- 
dern Science, impressed with the received notions in regard to 
its scope and intentions, will be, perhaps, not a little surprised 
and puzzled, to find that the thing which is, of all others, 
most strenuously insisted on by this author, in his own person, 
next to the worthlessness of the conceits which have no corre- 
spondence with things, is the fact that the knowledge of the 
physical causes is altogether inadequate to that relief of the 
condition of man, which he finds to be the immediate end of 
science; and that it is a system of metaphysics, a new meta- 
physics, which he is everywhere propounding to that end, — 
openly, and with all the latent force of his new rhetoric. 

It is ' metaphysical aid ' that he offers us ; it is magic, but, 
4 magic lawful as eating ' ; it is a priestly aid that he offers us, 
the aid of one who has penetrated to the inner sanctuary of 
the law, — the priest of nature, newly instructed in her mind 
and will, who comes forth from his long communing with her, 
with her own c great seal ' in his hands — with the rod of her 
enchantments, that old magicians desired to pluck from her, 
and did not — with the gift of the new and nobler miracles of 
seience as the witness of his anointing — with the reading of 
' God's book of power ' — with the alphabet of its mystery, as 
the proof of his ordaining — with the key of it, hid from the 
foundation of the world until now. 

The first difference between this metaphysics, and all the 
metaphysics that ever went before it or came after it, is, that 
it is practical. It carries in its hand, gathered into the sim- 
plicity of the causes that are not many, the secret of all 
motivity, the secret of all practice. It tells you so ; over and over 
again, in so many words, it dares to tell you so. It opens that 



462 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

closed palm a little, and shows you what is there; it bids you 
look on while it stirs those lines but a little, and new ages 
have begun. 

It is a practical metaphysics, and the first word of its speech 
is to forbid abstractions — your abstractions. It sets out from 
that which is ' constant, eternal, and universal'; but from that 
which is ' constant, eternal, and universal in nature.' It sets 
out from that which is fixed; but it is from the fixed and con- 
stant causes: 'forms' not ' ideas.' The simplicity which it seeks 
is the simplicity into which the historical phenomena are re- 
solvable; the terms which it seeks are the terms which do not 
come within the range of the unscientific experience; they 
are the unknown terms of the unlearned; they are the causes 
' which, like the alphabet, are not many'; they are the terms 
which the understanding knows, which the reason grasps, and 
comprehends in its unity; but they are the convertible terms 
of all the multiplicity and variety of the senses, they are 
the convertible terms — the practically convertible terms of the 
known — practically — that is the difference. 

In that pyramid of knowledges which the science of things 
constitutes ; in that converging ascent to the original simplicity 
and identity of nature, beginning at that broad science which 
makes its base — the science of Natural History — beginning with 
the basis of the historical complexity and difference; in that 
pyramid of science, that new and solid pyramid, which the 
Inductive science — which the inquiry into causes that are 
operant in nature builds, this author will not stop, either on 
that broad field of the universal history of nature, which is 
the base of it, or on that first stage of the ascent which the 
platform of ' the physical causes ' makes. The causes which 
lie next to our experience — the causes, which are variable 
and many, do not satisfy him. He gains that platform, and 
looks about him. He finds that even a diligent inquiry and 
observation there would result in many new inventions bene- 
ficial to men; but the knowledge of these causes 'takes men 
in narrow and restrained paths '; he wants for the founding of 
his rule of art the cause which, under all conditions, secures 



METAPHYSICAL AID. 463 

the result, which gives the widest possible command of means. 
He refuses to accept of the physical causes as the bourne of 
his philosophy, in theory or practice. He looks with a great 
human scorn on all the possible arts and solutions which lie 
on that platform, when the proposal is to stop his philosophy 
of speculation and practice there. It is not for the scientific 
arts, which that field of observation yields, that he begs leave 
to revive and re-integrate the misapplied and abused name of 
natural magic, which, in the true sense, is but natural wisdom, 
or ' PRUDENCE.' 

He can hardly stop to indicate the results which the culture 
of that field does yield for the relief of the human estate. His 
eye is uplifted to that new platform of a solid metaphysics, an 
historical metaphysics, which the inductive method builds. 
His eye is intent always on that higher stage of knowledge 
where that which is common to the sciences is found. He 
takes the other in passing only. Beginning with the basis of 
a new observation and history of nature, he will found a new 
metaphysics — an objective metaphysics — the metaphysics of 
induction. His logic is but a preparation for that. He is 
going to collect, by his inductive method, from all nature, 
from all species, the principles that are in all things-, and he is 
going to build, on the basis of those inducted principles, — on 
the sure basis of that which is constant, and eternal, and uni- 
versal in nature, the sure foundations of his universal practice; 
for, like common logic, the inductive method comprehends 
• alU That same simplicity, which the abstract speculations 
of men aspire to, and create, it aspires to and attains, by 
the rough roads, by the laboured stages of observation and 
experiment. 

He is, indeed, compelled to involve his phraseology here in 
a most studious haze of scholasticism. Perspicuity is by no 
means the quality of style most in request, when we come to 
these higher stages of sciences. Impenetrable mists, clouds, 
and darkness, impenetrable to any but the eye that seeks also 
the whole, involve the heaven-piercing peak of this new height 
of learning, this new summit of a scientific divinity, frowning 



464 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

off — warding off, as with the sword of the cherubim, the un- 
bidden invaders of this new Olympus, where sit the gods, re- 
stored again, — the simple powers of nature, recovered from the 
Greek abstractions, — not ( the idols ' — not the impersonated ab- 
stractions, the false images of the mind of man — not the 
logical forms of those spontaneous abstractions, emptied of 
their poetic content — but the strong gods that make our 
history, that compose our epics, that conspire for our tragedies, 
whether we own them and build altars to them or not. This 
is that summit of the prima philosophia where the axioms that 
command all are found — where the observations that are 
common to the sciences, and the precepts that are based on 
these, grow. This is that height where the same footsteps of 
nature, treading in different substances or matters, lost in the 
difference below, are all cleared and identified. This is the 
height of the forms of the understanding, of the unity of the 
reason; not as it is in man only, but as it is in all matters or 
substances. 

He does not care to tell us, — he could not well tell us, in 
popular language, what the true name of that height of learn- 
ing is : he could not well name without circumlocution, that 
height which a scientific abstraction makes, — an abstraction 
that attains simplicity without destroying the concrete reality, 
an abstraction that attains as its result only a higher history, 
— a new and more intelligible reading of it, — a solution of it — 
that which is fixed and constant and accounts for it, — an 
abstraction whose apex of unity is the highest, the universal 
history, that which accounts for all, — the equivalent, — the 
scientific equivalent of it. 

But whatever it be, it is something that is going to take the 
place of the unscientific abstractions, both in theory and prac- 
tice; it is something that is going to supplant ultimately the 
vain indolent speculation, the inert because unscientific specula- 
tion, that seeks to bind the human life in the misery of an 
enforced and sanctioned ignorance, sealing up with its dogmas 
to an eternal collision with the universal laws of God and na- 
ture, — laws that no dogma or conceit can alter, — all the 



METAPHYSICAL AID. 465 

unredeemed generations of the life of man. Whatever it be, 
it is going to strike with its primeval rock, through all the air 
palace of the vain conceits of men ; — it is going straight up, 
through that old conglomeration of dogmas, that the ages of 
the human ignorance have built and left to us. The unity to 
which all things in nature, inspired with her universal instinct 
tend, — the unity of which the mind and heart of man in its 
sympathy with the universal whole is but an expression, that 
unity of its own which the mind is always seeking to impart 
to the diversities which the unreconciled experience offers it, 
which it must have in its objective reality, which it will make 
for itself if it cannot find it, which it does make in ignorant 
ages, by falling back upon its own form and ignoring the 
historic reality, — which it builds up without any solid objec- 
tive basis, by ignoring the nature of things, or founds on one- 
sided partial views of their nature, that unity is going to 
have its place in the new learning also — but it is going to be 
henceforth the unity of knowledge — not of dogmas, not of belief 
merely, for knowledge, and not belief merely, — knowledge, 
and not opinion, is power. 

That man is not the only creature in nature, was the discovery 
of this philosophy. The founders of it observed that there were 
a number of species, which appeared to be maintaining a cer- 
tain sort of existence of their own, without being dependent 
for it on the movements within the human brain. To abate 
the arrogance of the species, — to show the absurdity and 
ignorance of the attempt to constitute the universe beforehand 
within that little sphere, the human skull, ignoring the reports 
of the intelligencers from the universal whole, with which 
great nature has herself supplied us, — to correct the arrogance 
and specific bias of the human learning, — was the first 
attempt of the new logic. It is the house of the Universal 
Father that we dwell in, and it has ' many mansions,' and ' man 
is not the best lodged in it.' Noble, indeed, is his form in 
nature, inspired with the spirit of the universal whole, able in 
his littleness to comprehend and embrace the whole, made in 
the image of the universal Primal Cause, whose voice for us is 

H H 



466 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

human ; but there are other dialects of the divine also, — there 
are nobler creatures lodged with us, placed above us; with 
larger gifts, with their ten talents ruling over our cities. 
There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. 
Their line is gone out through all the earth also, and their 
words unto the end of the world; and the poor beetle that we 
tread on, and the daisy and the lily in all its glory, and the 
sparrows that are going ' two for a farthing,' come in for their 
place also in this philosophy — the philosophy of science — 
the philosophy of the kinds, the philosophy of the nature that 
is one in them, — the metaphysics of history. 

' Although there exists nothing in nature except indivi- 
dual bodies, exhibiting distinct individual effects, according to 
individual laws, yet in each branch of learning that very 
LAW, — its investigation, discover]/ and development — are the 
foundation both of theory and practice ; this law, therefore, 
and its parallel in each science, is what we understand by the 
term, form. 

That is a sentence to crack the heads of the old abstraction- 
ists. Before that can be read, the new logic will have to be 
put in requisition ; the idols of the tribe will have to be dis- 
missed first. The inveterate and ' pernicious habit of abstrac- 
tion,' — that so pernicious habit of the men of learning must 
be overawed first. 

1 There exists nothing in nature except individual bodies, 
exhibiting distinct individual effects, according to individual 
laws." 1 The concrete is very carefully guarded there against 
that ' pernicious habit ' ; it is saved at the expense of the human 
species, at the expense of its arrogance. Nobody need under- 
take to abstract those laws, whatever they may be, for this 
master has turned his key on them. They are in their proper 
place; they are in the things themselves, and cannot be taken 
out of them. The utmost that you can do is to attain to a 
scientific knowledge of them, one that exactly corresponds 
with them. That correspondence is the point in the new 
metaphysics, and in the new logic; — that was what was want- 
ing in the old. ' The investigation, discovery, and development 



METAPHYSICAL AID. 467 

of this law, in every braneh of learning, are the foundation 
both of theory and practice. This law, therefore, and its 
parallel in each science, is what we understand by the term 
FORM.' The distinction is very carefully made between the 
' cause in nature,' and that which corresponds to it, in the 
human mind, the parallel to it in the sciences; for the notions 
of men and the notions of nature are extremely apt to differ 
when the mind is left to form its notions without any scientific 
rule or instrument; and these ill-made abstractions, which 
do not correspond with the cause in nature, are of no efficacy 
in the arts, for nature takes no notice of them whatever. 

There is one term in use here which represents at the same 
time the cause in nature, and that which corresponds to it in 
the mind of man — the parallel to it in the sciences. When 
these exactly correspond, one term suffices. The term ' form' 
is preferred for that purpose in this school. The term which 
was applied to the abstractions of the old philosophy, with a 
little modification, is made to signalise the difference between 
the old and the new. The ' ideas' of the old philosophy, the 
hasty abstractions of it, are ' the idols ' of the new — the false 
deceiving images — which must be destroyed ere that which 
is fixed and constant in nature can establish its own parallels 
in our learning. ' Too untimely a departure, and too remote 
a recess from particulars,' is the cause briefly assigned in this 
criticism for this want of correspondence hitherto. ' But it is 
manifest that Plato, in his opinion of ideas, as one that had a 
wit of elevation situate as upon a cliff, did descry that forms 
were the true object of knowledge, but lost the real fruit of 
that opinion by considering of forms as absolutely abstracted 
from matter, and not confined and determined by matter/ 
' Lost the fruit of that opinion' — this is the author who talks 
so ' pressly/ Two thousand years of human history are sum- 
med up in that so brief chronicle. Two thousand years of 
barren science, of wordy speculation, of vain theory; two 
thousand years of blind, empirical, unsuccessful groping in all 
the fields of human practice. ' And so/ he continues, con- 
cluding that summary criticism with a little further develop- 

H H 2 



468 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

ment of the subject, ' and so, turning his opinion upon theology, 
wherewith all his natural philosophy is infected.' Natural 
philosophy infected with ' opinion,' — no matter whose opinion 
it is, or under what name it comes to us, whatever else it is 
good for, is not good for practice. And this is the philosophy 
which includes both theory and practice. ' That which in 
speculative philosophy corresponds to the cause, in practical 
philosophy becomes the rule.' 

But that which distinguishes this from all others is, that it is 
the philosophy of * hope' ; and that is the name for it in both 
its fields, in speculation and practice. The black intolerable 
wall, which those who stopped us on the lower platform of 
this pyramid of true knowledge brought us up with so soon — 
that blank wall with which the inquiry for the physical causes 
in nature limits and insults our speculation — has no place 
here, no place at all on this higher ground of science, which 
the knowledge of true forms creates — this true ground of the 
understanding, the understanding of nature, and the universal 
reason of things. ( He who is acquainted with forms, compre- 
hends the unity of nature in substances apparently most distinct 
from each other/ Neither is that base and sordid limit, with 
which the philosophy of physical causes shuts in the scientific 
arts and their power for human relief, found here. For this is 
the prima philosophia, where the universal axioms, the axioms 
that command all, are found: and the precepts of the universal 
practice are formed on them. ' Even the philosopher himself 
— openly speaking from this summit — will venture to inti- 
mate briefly to men of understanding' the comprehension of 
its base, and the field of practice which it commands. ' Is not 
the ground/ he inquires, modestly, ' is not the ground which 
Machiavel wisely and largely discourseth concerning govern- 
ments, that the way to establish and preserve them is to reduce 
them ad principia, a rule in religion and nature, as well as in 
civil administration V There is the ' administrative reform' 
that will not need reforming, that waits for the science of 
forms and constructions. But he proceeds: 'Was not the 
Persian magic [and that is the term which he proposes to 
restore for 'the part operative' of this knowledge of forms], 



METAPHYSICAL AID. 469 

was not the Persian magic a reduction or correspondence of the 
principles and architecture of nature to the rules and policy of 
governments V There is no harm, of course, in that timid in- 
quiry; but the student of the Zenda-vesta will be able to get, 
perhaps, some intimation of the designs that are lurking here, 
and will understand the revived and reintegrated sense with 
which the term magic is employed to indicate the part opera- 
tive of this new ground of science. ' Neither are these only 
similitudes/ he adds, after extending these significant inquiries 
into other departments of practice, and demonstrating that this 
is the universality from which all other professions are nou- 
rished : ' Neither are these only similitudes, as men of narrow 
observation may conceive them to be, but the same footsteps of 
nature, treading or printing upon several subjects or matters/ 

1 It must, however, be observed, that this method of operating 
[which considers nature as SIMPLE, though in a concrete body] * 
sets out from what is constant, eternal, and universal in nature ; 
and opens such broad paths to human power, as the thought of 
man can in the present state of things scarcely comprehend or 
figure to itself,' 

Yes, it is the Philosophy of Hope. The perfection of the 
human form, the limit of the human want, is the limit of its 
practice; the limit of the human inquiry and demand is the 
limit of its speculation. 

The control of effects which this higher knowledge of nature 
offers us — this knowledge of what she is beforehand • — the 
practical certainty which this interior acquaintance with her, 
this acquaintance that identifies her under all the variety of 
her manifestations, is able to command — that comprehensive 
command of results which the knowledge of the true causes 
involves — the causes which are always present in all effects, 
which are constant under all fluctuations, the same under all 
the difference — the '■power'' of this knowledge, its power to 
relieve human suffering, is that which the discoverer of it 
insists on most in propounding it to men; but the mind in 
which that ' wonder' — that is, ' the seed of knowledge' — 

* ' I the first of any, by my universal being/.'' 

Michael de Montaigne. 



47° THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

brought forth this plant, was not one to overlook or make light 
of that want in the human soul, which only knowledge can 
appease — that love which leads it to the truth, not for the 
sake of a secondary good, but because it is her life. 

' Although there is a most intimate connection, and almost 
an identity between the ways of human power and human 
knowledge, yet on account of the pernicious and inveterate 
habit of dwelling upon abstractions, it is by far the safest 
method to commence and build up sciences from those founda- 
tions which bear a relation to the practical division, and to let 
them mark out and limit the theoretical. Something like that 
the Poet must have been thinking of, when he spoke of 
making ' the art and practic part of life, the mistress to its 
theoric;' — ' let that mark out and limit the theoretical.' 

That inveterate and pernicious habit, which makes this course 
the safest one, is one that he speaks of in the Advancement of 
Learning, as that which has been of ' such ill desert towards 
learning,' as ' to reduce it to certain empty and barren generali- 
ties, the mere husks and shells of sciences/ good for nothing 
at the very best, unless they serve to guide us to the kernels 
that have been forced out of them, by the torture andp'ess of 
the method, — the mere outlines and skeletons of knowledges, 
' that do but offer knowledge to scorn of practical men, and 
are no more aiding to practice,' as the author of this universal 
skeleton confesses, ' than an Ortelius's universal map is, to 
direct the way between London and York.' 

The way to steer clear of those empty and barren generali- 
ties, which do but offer learning to the scorn of the men of 
practice is, he says, to begin on the practical side, and that is 
just what we are doing here now in this question of the con- 
sulship, — that so practical and immediately urgent question 
which was, threatening then to drive out every other from 
the human consideration. If learning had anything to offer 
on that subject, which would not excite the scorn of practical 
men, then certainly was the time to produce it. 

We begin on the practical side here, and as to theory, we 
are rigidly limited to that which the question of the play re- 
quires . — the practical question marks it out, — we have just 



METAPHYSICAL AID. 47 I 

as much as is required for the solution of that, and not so 
much as a 'jot' more. But mark the expression: — 'it is by 
far the safest method to commence and build up sciences' — 
the particular sciences, — the branches of science — from those 
foundations which bear a relation to the practical division. We 
begin with a great practical question, and though the treatise 
is in a form which seems to offer it for amusement, rather than 
instruction, it has at least this advantage, that it does not offer 
it in the suspicious form of a theory, or in the distasteful form 
of a learned treatise, — a tissue of barren and empty generali- 
ties. The scorn of practical men is avoided, if it were only 
by its want of pretension ; and the fact that it does not offer 
itself as a guide to practice, but rather insinuates itself into 
that position. We begin with the practical question, with its 
most sharply practical details, we begin with particulars, but 
that which is to be noted is, ' the foundations' of the universal 
philosophy are under our feet to begin with. At the first step 
we are on the platform of the prima philosophia ; the last 
conclusions of the inductive science, the knowledge of the 
nature of things, is the ground, — the solid continuity — that 
we proceed on. That is the ground on which we build this 
practice. That is the trunk from which this branch of 
sciences is continued : — that trunk of universality which we 
are forbidden henceforth to scorn, because all the professions 
are nourished from it. That universality which the men of 
practice scorn no more, since they have tasted of its proofs, 
since they have reached that, single bough of it, which 
stooped so low, to bring its magic clusters within their reach. 
Fed with their own chosen delights, with the proof of the 
divinity of science, on their sensuous lips, they cry, ' Thou 
hast kept the good wine until now.' Clasping on the magic 
robes for which they have not toiled or spun, sitting down by 
companies, — not of fifties, — not of hundreds, — not of thou- 
sands — sitting down by myriads, to this great feast, that the 
man of science spreads for them, in whose eye, the eye of a 
divine pity looked forth again, and saw them faint and weary 
still, and without a shepherd, — sitting down to this feast, for 
which there is no sweat or blood on their brows, revived, re- 



472 THE CUKE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

joicing, gazing on the bewildering basket fuls that are pouring 
in, they cry, answering after so long a time, for their part 
Pilate's question : This, so far as it goes at least, this is truth. 
And the rod of that enchantment was plucked here. It is but 
a branch from this same trunk — this trunk of ' univer- 
sality,' which the men of practice will scorn no more, when 
once they reach the multitudinous boughs of this great tree of 
miracles, where the nobler fruits, the more chosen fruits of the 
new science, are hidden still. 

Continued from that ' trunk,' heavy with its juices, stoops 
now this branch ; its golden ' hangings' mellowed, — time mel- 
lowed, — ready to fall unshaken. Built on that ' foundation,' 
rises now this fair structure, the doctrine of the state. That 
knowledge of nature in general, that interior knowledge of her, 
that loving insight, which is not baffled with her most foreign 
aspects; but detects her, and speaks her word, as from within, 
in all, is that which meets us here, that which meets us at 
the threshold. Our guide is veiled, but his raiment is 
priestly. It is great nature's stole that he wears; he will alter 
our — Persian. We are walking on the pavements of Art; but 
it is Nature's temple still; it is her ' pyramid,' and we axe within, 
and the light from the apex is kindling all; and the dust 
' that the rude wind blows in our face/ and ' the poor beetle 
that we tread on,' and the poor ' madman and beggar too/ are 
glorious in it, and of our 'kin.' Those universal forms which the 
book of science in the abstract has laid bare already, are run- 
ning through all ; the cord of them is visible in all the detail. 
Their foot-prints, which have been tracked to the height 
where nature is one, are seen for the first time cleared, un- 
covered here, in all the difference. This many- voiced speech, 
that sounds so deep from every point, deep as from the heart 
of nature, is not the ventriloquist's artifice, is not a poor show- 
man's trick. It is great nature's voice — her own; and the 
magician who has untied her spell, who knows the cipher of 
'the one in all' the priest who has unlocked her inmost 
shrine, and plucked out the heart of her mystery — is ' the 
Interpreter.' 



PLAN OF INNOVATION — NEW DEFINITIONS. 473 



CHAPTEE IX. 

THE CURE — PLAN OF INNOVATION — NEW DEFINITIONS. 

' Swear by thy double self 
And that's an oath of credit.' 

' Having thus far proceeded 
Is it not meet 
That I did amplify my judgment in 
Other conclusions?' 

TT is the trunk of the prima philusophia then which puts 
■*■ forth these new and wondrous boughs, into all the fields 
of human speculation and practice, filling all our outdoor, 
penetrating all our indoor life, with their beauty and fragrance; 
overhanging every roof, stooping to every door, with their 
rich curtains and clusters of ornament and delight, with their 
ripe underhanging clusters of axioms of practice — brought 
down to particulars, ready for use — with their dispersed 
directions overhanging every path, — with their aphorisms 
made out of the pith and heart of sciences, ' representing a 
broken knowledge, and, therefore, inviting the men of specu- 
lation to inquire farther.' 

It is from this trunk of a scientific universality, of a useful, 
practical, always-at-hand, all-inclusive, historical universality, 
to which the tracking of the principles, operant in history, to 
their simple forms and ' causes in nature? conducts the scien- 
tific experimenter, — it is from this primal living trunk and 
heart of sciences, to which the new method of learning con- 
ducts us, that this great branch of scientific practice comes, 
which this drama with its ' transitory shows ' has brought 
safely down to us; — this two-fold branch of ethics and politics, 
which come to us — conjoined — as ethics and politics came in 



474 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

other systems then not scientific, — making in their junction, 
and through all their divergencies, ' the forbidden questions ' 
of science. 

The science of this essentially conjoined doctrine is that 
which makes, in this case, the novelty. ' The nature which is 
formed in everything,' and not in man only, and the faculty, in 
man, of comprehending that wider nature, is that which makes 
the higher ground, from which a science of his own specific 
nature, and the explanation of its phenomenon, is possible to 
man. Except from this height of a common nature, there is no 
such thing as a scientific explanation of these phenomena 
possible. And this explanation is what the specific nature in 
man, with its speculative grasp of a larger whole — with its 
speculative grasp of a universal whole, — with its instinctive 
moral reach and comprehension corresponding to that, — con- 
stitutionally demands and ' anticipates.' 

And the knowledge of this nature which is formed in every- 
thing, and not in man only, is the beginning, not of a specu- 
lative science of the human nature merely, — it is the begin- 
ning, — it is the indispensable foundation of the arts in which 
a successful artistic advancement of that nature, or an artistic 
cure or culture of it is propounded. The fact that the ' human 
nature' is, indeed, what it is called, a 'nature,'' the fact that 
the human species is a species, — the fact that the human kind 
is but a kind, neighboured with many others from which it is 
isolated by its native walls of ignorance, — neighboured with 
many others, more or less known, known and unknown, more 
or less kind-\y, more or less hostile, — species, kinds, whose 
dialects of the universal laws, man has not found, — the fact 
that the universal, historic principles are operant in all the 
specific modifications of human nature, and control and deter- 
mine them, the fact that the human life admits of a scientific 
analysis, and that its phenomena require to be traced to their 
true forms, — this is the fact which is the key to the new philo- 
sophy, — the key which unlocks it, — the key to the part 
speculative, and the part operative of it. 

And this is the secret of the difference between this philo- 



PLAN OF INNOVATION — NEW DEFINITIONS. 4.75 

sophy and all other systems and theories of man's life on earth 
that had been before it, or that have come after it. For this 
new and so solid height of natural philosophy, — solid, — his- 
torical, — from its base in the divergency of natural history, to 
its utmost peak of unity, — this scientific height of a common 
nature, whose summit is ' prima philosophia,' with its new uni- 
versal terms and axioms, — this height from which man, as a 
species, is also overlooked, and his spontaneous notions and 
theories criticised, subjected to that same criticism with which 
history itself is always flying in the face of them, — from which 
the specific bias in them is everywhere detected, — this new 
1 pyramid ' of knowledge is the one on whose rock-hewn terraces 
the conflict of views, the clash of man's opinions shall not sound : 
this is the system which has had, and shall have, no rival. 

And this is the key to this philosophy, not where it touches 
human nature only, but everywhere where it substitutes for 
abstract human notions — specific human notions that are pow- 
erless in the arts, or narrow observations that are restrained 
and uncertain in the rules of practice they produce, — powers, 
true forms, original agencies in nature, universal powers, sure 
as nature herself, and her universal form. 

To abase the specific human arrogance, to overthrow ' the 
idols of the tribe,' is the ultimate condition of this learning. 
Man as man, is not a primal, if he be an ultimate, fact in 
nature. Nature is elder and greater than he, and requires 
him to learn of her, and makes little of .his mere conceits and 
dogmas. 

From the height of that new simplicity which this philo- 
sophy has gained — not as the elder philosophies had gained 
theirs, by pure contemplation, by hasty abstraction and retreat 
to the a priori sources of knowledge and belief in man, — 
which it has gained, too, by a wider induction than the facts 
of the human nature can supply — with the torch of these 
universal principles cleared of their historic complexities, with 
the torch of the nature that is formed in everything, it enters 
here this great, unenclosed field of human life and practice, 
this Spenserian wilderness, where those old, gnarled trunks, 



476 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

and tangled boughs, and wretched undergrowths of centuries, 
stop the way, where those old monsters, which the action of 
this play exposes, which this philosophy is bound to drag out 
to the day, are hid. 

The radical universal fact — the radical universal distinction 
of the double nature of GOOD which is formed in everything, 
and not in man only, and the two universal motions which 
correspond to that, the one, as everything, is a. total or substan- 
tive in itself, with its corresponding motion; for this is the 
principle of selfishness and war in nature — the principle 
which struggles everywhere towards decay and the dissolution 
of the larger wholes, and not in man only, though the foolish, 
unscientific man, who does not know how to track the pheno- 
mena of his own nature to their causes, — who has no bridge 
from the natural internal phenomena of his own consciousness 
into the continent of nature, may think that it is, and reason 
of it as if it were; — this double nature of good, ' the one, as a 
thing, is a total or substantive in itself, the other as it is, apart 
or member of a greater body, whereof the latter is in degree the 
greater and the worthier, as it tends to the conservation of a more 
general form' — this distinction, which the philosopher of this 
school has laid down in his work on the scientific advancement 
of the human species, with a recommendation that it should be 
strongly planted, which he has planted there, openly, as the 
root of a new science of ethics and policy, will be found at the 
heart of all this new history of the human nature; but in this 
play of the true nobility, and the scientific cure of the common- 
weal, it is tracked openly to its most immediate, obvious, 
practical application. In all these great ' illustrated' scientific 
works, which this new school of learning, with the genius of 
science for its master, contrived to issue, all the universally 
actual and active principles are tracked to their proper specific 
modifications in man, and not to their development in his 
actual history merely; and the distinctive essential law of the 
human kind — the law whereby man is man, as distinguished 
from the baser kinds, is brought up, and worked out, and un- 
folded in all its detail, from the bosom of the universal law — is 



PLAN OF INNOVATION — NEW DEFINITIONS. 477 

brought down from its barren height of isolation, and planted 
in the universal rule of being, in the universal law of kinds 
and essence. This double nature of good, as it is specifically 
developed in man, not as humanity only, for man is not limited 
to his kind in his intelligence, or in his will, or in his affec- 
tions, — this double nature of good, as it is developed in man, 
with his contemplative, and moral, and religious grasp of a 
larger whole than his particular and private nature can com- 
prehend — with his large discourse looking before and after, 
on the one hand, and his blind instincts, and his narrow 
isolating senses on the other — with that distinctive human 
nature on the one hand, whereby he does, in some sort, com- 
prehend the world, and not intellectually only — that nature 
whereby ' the world is set in his heart,' and not in his mind 
only — that nature which by the law of advancement to the 
perfection of his form, he struggles to ascend to — that, on the 
one hand, and that whereby he is kindred with the lower 
natures on the other, swayed by a gosling's instinct, held down 
to the level of the pettiest, basest kinds, forbidden to ascend to 
his own distinctive excellence, allied with species who have no 
such intelligent outgoing from particulars, who cannot grasp 
the common, whose sphere nature herself has narrowed and 
walled in, — these two universal natures of good, and all the 
passion and affection which lie on that tempestuous border line 
where they blend in the human, and fill the earth with the 
tragedy of their confusion, — this two-fold nature, and its 
tragic blending, and its true specific human development, 
whereby man is man, and not degenerate, lies discriminated in 
all these plays, tracked through all their wealth of observation, 
through all their characterization, through all their mirth, 
through all their tempests of passion, with a line so firm, that 
only the instrument of the New Science could have graven it. 

' Of all the sciences, Policy is the most immersed in matter, 
and the hardliest reduced to axiom ' ; but setting out from 
that which is constant and universal in nature, this philosopher 
is not afraid to undertake it; and, indeed, that is what he is 
bent on; for unless those universal, historical principles, which 



478 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

he has taken so much pains to exhibit to us clearly in their 
abstract form, ' terminate in matter and construction according 
to the true definitions, they are speculative and of little use.' 
The termination of them in matter, and the new construction 
according to true definitions, is the business here. This, which 
is the hardliest reduced to axiom of any, is that which lies 
collected on the Inductive Tables here, cleared of all that in- 
terferes with the result; and the axiom of practice, which is 
the l second vintage' of the New Machine, is expressed before 
our eyes. ' For that which in speculative philosophy corre- 
sponds to the cause, in practical philosophy becomes the rule.' 

He starts here, with this grand advantage which no other 
political philosopher or reformer had ever had before; he has 
the true definition in his hands to begin with; not the specific 
and futile notions with which the human mind, shut up 
within itself, seeks to comprehend and predict and order all, 
but the solid actual universals that the mind of man, by the 
combination and scientific balance of its faculties, is able to 
ascend to. He has in his hands, to begin with, the causes that 
are universal and constant in nature, with which all the historical 
phenomena are convertible, — the motives from which all move- 
ment proceeds, the true original simple powers, — the unknown, 
into which all the variety of the known is resolvable, or rather 
the known into which all the variety of the unknown is resolvable; 
the forms ' which are always present when the particular nature 
is present, and universally attest that presence; which are 
always absent when the particular nature is absent, and uni- 
versally attest that absence; which always increase as the par- 
ticular nature increases; which always decrease as the particu- 
lar nature decreases; ' that is the kind of definitions which this 
philosopher will undertake his moral reform with ; that is the 
kind of idea which the English philosopher lays down for the 
basis of his politics. Nothing less solid than that will suit the 
turn of his genius, either in speculation or practice. He does 
full justice to the discoveries of the old Greek philosophers, 
whose speculation had controlled, not the speculation only, 
but all the practical doctrine of the world, from their time to 



PLAN OF INNOVATION — NEW DEFINITIONS. 479 

his. He saw from what height of genius they achieved their 
command; but that was two thousand years before, and that 
was in the south east corner of Europe ; and when the Modern 
Europe began to think for itself, it was found that the Greeks 
could not give the law any longer. It was found that the 
English notions at least, and the Greek notions of things in 
general differed very materially — essentially — when they came 
to be put on paper. When the ' representative men ' of those 
two corners of Europe, and of those two so widely separated 
ages of the human advancement, came to discourse together 
from their ' cliffs ' and compare notes, across that sea of lesser 
minds, the most remarkable differences, indeed, began to be 
perceptible at once, though the world has not yet begun to 
appreciate them. It was a difference that was expected to tell 
on the common mind, for a time, principally in its ' effects. 1 
Everybody, the learned and the unlearned, understands now, 
that after the modern survey was taken, new practical direc- 
tions were issued at once. Orders came down for an immedi- 
ate suspension of those former rules of philosophy, and the 
ship was laid on a new course. ' Plato,' says the new philoso- 
pher, ' as one that had a wit of elevation situate upon a cliff, did 
descry that forms are the true object of knowledge,' that was his 
discovery, — ' but lost the fruit of that opinion by' — shutting him- 
self up, in short, in his own abstract contemplations, in his little 
world of man, and getting out his theory of the universe, before 
hand, from these; instead of applying himself practically and 
modestly to the observation of that universe, in which man's 
part is so humble. ' Vain man,' says our oldest Poet, ' vain 
man would be wise, who is born like a wild ass's colt.' 

But let us take a specimen of the manner in which the pro- 
pounder of the New Ideal Philosophy e comes to particulars,' 
with this quite new kind of IDEAS, and we shall find that they 
were designed to take in some of those things in heaven and 
earth that were omitted, or not dreampt of in the others, — which 
were not included in the ' idols.' He tells us plainly that 
these are the ideas with which he is going to unravel the most 
delicate questions; but he is willing to entertain his immediate 



480 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

audience, and propitiate the world generally, by trying them, 
or rather giving orders to have them tried, on other things 
first. He does not pride himself very much on anything 
which he has done, or is able to do in these departments of 
inquiry from which his instances are here taken, and he says, 
in this connection: — ' We do not, however, deny that other in- 
stances can perhaps be added.' In order to arrive at his doctrine of 
practice in general, he begins af er the scientific method, not 
with the study of any one kind of actions only, he begins by 
collecting the rules of action in general. By observation of 
species he seeks to ascend to the principles common to them. 
And he comes to us with a carefully prepared scheme of the 
* elementary motions,' — outlined, and enriched with such ob- 
servations as he and his school have been able to make under 
the disadvantages of that beginning. ' The motions of bodies/ 
he observes, ' are compounded, decomposed and combined, no 
less than the bodies themselves,' and he directs the attention 
of the student, who has his eye on practice, with great empha- 
sis, to those instances which he calls ' instances of predomi- 
nance,' — ' instances which point out the predominance and 
submission of powers, compared [not in abstract contemplation 
but in action,] compared with each other, and which, [not in 
books but in action,] — which is the more energetic and svpe- 
rior, or more weak and inferior. 

' These 'elementary notions,' direct and are directed by each 
other, according to their strength, — quantity, excitement, con- 
cussion, or the assistance, or impediments they meet with. For 
instance, some magnets support iron sixty times their own 
weight; so far does the motion of lesser congregation predomi- 
nate over the greater, but if the weight be increased it yields! 

[We must observe, that he is speaking here of ' the motions, 
tendencies, and active powers which are most universal in 
nature,' for the purpose of suggesting rules of practice which 
apply as widely ; though he keeps, with the intimation above 
quoted, principally to this class of instances.] ' A lever of a 
certain strength will raise a given weight, and so far the notion 
of liberty predominates over that of the greater congregation ; 



PLAN OF INNOVATION — NEW DEFINITIONS. 48 1 

but if the weight be greater, the former motion yields. A 
piece of leather, stretched to a certain point, does not break, 
and so far the motion of continuity predominates' [for it is the 
question of predominance, and dominance, and domineering, 
and lordships, and liberties, of one kind and another, that he is 
handling] — ' so far the motion of continuity predominates over 
that of tension; but if the tension be greater, the leather 
breaks, and the motion of continuity yields. A certain quan- 
tity of water flows through a chink, and so far the motion of 
greater congregation predominates over that of continuity ; but 
if the chink be smaller, it yields. If a musket be charged with 
ball and powdered sulphur only, and the fire be applied, the 
ball is not discharged, in which case the motion of greater 
congregation overcomes that of matter; but when gunpowder 
is used, the motion of matter in the sulphur predominates, being 
assisted by that motion, and the motion of avoidance in the 
nitre; and so of the rest.' 

Our more recent chemists would, of course, be inclined to 
criticise that explanation; but, in some respects, it is better 
than theirs ; and it answers well enough the purpose for which 
it was introduced there, and for which it is introduced here 
also. For this is the initiative of the great inquiry into ' the 
WRESTLING INSTANCES,' and the ' instances of PREDOMI- 
NANCE' in general, ' such as point out the predominance of 
powers, compared with each other, and which of them is the 
more energetic and superior, or more weak and inferior'; 
and though this class of instances is valued chiefly for its 
illustration of another in this system of learning, where things 
are valued in proportion to their usefulness, they are not 
sought for as similitudes merely; they are produced by one 
who regards them as c the same footsteps of nature, treading in 
different substances,' and leaving the foot-print of universal 
axioms; and this is a class of instances which he particularly 
recommends to inquiry. ' For wrestling instances, which 
show the predominance of powers, and in what manner and pro- 
portion they predominate and yield, must be searched for with 
active and industrious diligence.' 

1 1 



482 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

' The method and nature of this yielding' [of this yielding — 
subjection is the question] ' must also be diligently exa- 
mined; as, for instance, whether the motions' [' of liberty'] 
' completely cease, or exert themselves, but are constrained ; 
for in all bodies with which we are acquainted, there is no real, 
but an apparent rest, either in the whole, or in the parts. This 
apparent rest is occasioned either by equilibrium' [as in the 
case of Hamlet, as well as in that of some others whose acts 
were suspended, and whose wills were arrested then, by con- 
siderations not less comprehensive than his] — ' either by 
equilibrium, or by the absolute predominance of motions. By 
equilibrium, as in the scales of the balance, which rest if the 
weight be equal. By predominance, as in perforated jars, in 
which the water rests, and is prevented from falling by the 
predominance of the motion of connection.' 

' It is, however, to be observed (as we have said before), 
how far the yielding motions exert themselves. For, if a man be held 
stretched out on the ground against his will, with arms and 
legs bound down, or otherwise confined — [as the Duke of Kent's 
were, for instance] — and yet strive with all his power to get 
up, the struggle is not the less, though ineffectual. The real 
state of the case' [namely, whether the yielding motion be, as 
it were, annihilated by the predominance, or there be rather a 
continued, though an invisible effort] ' will perhaps appear in 
the concurrence of motions, although it escape our notice 
in their conflict.' So delicately must philosophy needs be con- 
veyed in a certain stage of a certain class of wrestling instances, 
where a combination of powers hostile to science produces an 
' absolute predominance' of powers, and it is necessary that the 
yielding motion should at least appear to be ' as it were, anni- 
hilated'; though, of course, that need not hinder the invisible 
effort at all. ' For on account of the rawness and unskilful- 
ness of the hands through which they pass,' there is no diffi- 
culty in inserting such intimations as to the latitude of the 
axioms which these particular instances adduced here, and 
' others which might perhaps be added,' are expected to yield. 
This is an instance of the freedom with which philosophical 



TLAN OF INNOVATION — NEW DEFINITIONS, 483 

views on certain subjects are continually addressed in these 
times, to that immediate audience of the few ' who will per- 
haps see farther into them than the common reader,' and to 
those who shall hereafter apply to the philosophy issued under 
such conditions — the conditions above described, that key of 
' Times,' which the author of it has taken pains to leave for 
that purpose. But the question of ' predominance, which 
makes our present subject,' is not yet sufficiently indicated. 
There are more and less powerful motives concerned in this 
wrestling instance, as he goes on to demonstrate. 

' The rules of such instances of predominance as occur 
should be collected, such as the following ' ~ and the rule which 
he gives, by way of a specimen of these rules, is a very im- 
portant one for a statesman to have, and it is one which the 
philosopher has himself ' collected ' from such instances as oc- 
curred — ' The more general the desired advantage is, the 
stronger will be the motive. The motion of connection, for in- 
stance, which relates to the intercourse of the parts of the uni- 
verse, is more powerful than that of gravity, which relates to 
the intercourse of dense bodies. Again; the desire of a private 
good does not, in general, prevail against that of a public one, 
except where the quantities are small [it is the general law he 
is propounding here; and the exception, the anomaly, is that 
which he has to note] ; would that such were the case in civil 
matters.' 

But that application to ' civil matters,' which the statesman, 
propounding in his own person this newly-collected knowledge 
of the actual historic forces, as a new and immeasurable source- 
of relief to the human estate, — that application, which he could 
only make here in these side-long glances, is made in the Play 
without any difficulty at all. These instances, which he pro- 
duces here in his professed work of science, are produced as 
illustrations of the kind of inquiry which he is going to bring 
to bear, with all the force and subtlety of his genius, on the 
powers of nature, as manifested in the individual human 
nature, and in those unions and aggregations to which it 
tends — those larger wholes and greater congregations, which 

1 1 2 



484 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

parliaments, and pulpits, and play-houses, and books, were 
forbidden then, on pain of death and torture and ignominy, 
to meddle with. Here, he tells us, he finds it to the purpose 
to select ' suggestive instances, such as point out that which is 
advantageous to mankind ' ; ' and it is a part of science to 
make judicious inquiries and wishes.' 

These instances, which he produces here, are searching; but 
they are none too searching for his purpose. They do not 
come any nearer to nature than those others which he is pre- 
pared to add to them. The treatment is not any more radical 
and subtle here than it is in those instances in which ' he comes 
to particulars,' under the pretence of play and pastime, in other 
departments, — those in which the judicious inquiry into the 
laws of the actual forces promises to yield rules ' the most 
generally useful to mankind.' 

This is the philosophy precisely which underlies all this 
Play, — this Play, in which the great question, not yet ready 
for the handling of the unlearned, but ripe already for scien- 
tific treatment, — the question of the wrestling forces, — the 
question of the subjection and predominance of powers, — the 
question of the combination and opposition of forces in those 
arrested motions which make states, is so boldly handled. 
Those arrested motions, where the rest is only apparent, not 
real — where the ' yielding ' forces are only, as it were, anni- 
hilated, whether by equilibrium of forces, or an absolute pre- 
dominance, but biding their time, ready to burst their bonds 
and renew their wrestling, ready to show themselves, not as 
1 subjects,' but predominators — not as states, but revolutions. 
The science 'that ends in matter and new constructions' — 
new construction, ' according to true definitions,' is what these 
citizens, whom this Poet has called up from their horizontal 
position by way of anticipation, are already, under his instruc- 
tions, boldly clamouring for. Constructions in which these 
very rules and axioms, these scientific certainties, are taken 
into the account, are what these men. whom this Magician has 
set upon their feet here, whose lips he has opened v and whose 
arms he has unbound with the magic of his art, are going ta 






TLAN OF INNOVATION — NEW DEFINITIONS. 485 

have before they lie down again, or, at least, before they make 
a comfortable state for any one to trample on, though they 
may, perhaps, for a time seem, ' as it were, annihilated.' 

These true forms, these real definitions, this new kind of 
ideas, these new motions, new in philosophy, new in human 
speech, old in natures, — written in her book ere man was, — 
these universal, elementary, original motions, which he is ex- 
hibiting here in the philosophic treatise, under cover of a 
certain class of instances, are the very ones which he is 
tracking here in the Play, into all the business of the state. 
This is that same new thread which we saw there in the 
grave philosophic warp, with here and there a little space 
filled in, not with the most brilliant filling; enough, however, 
to show that it was meant to be filled, and, to the careful eye, 
— how. But here it is the more chosen substance ; and every 
point of this illustrious web is made of its involutions, — is 
a point of 'illustration.' 

Yes, here he is again. Here he is at last, in that promised 
field of his labours, — that field of ' noblest subjects,' for the 
culture of which he will have all nature put under contri- 
bution ; here he is at large, ' making what work he pleases.' 
He who is content to talk from his chair of professional 
learning of 'pieces of leather,' and their unions, and bid his 
pupil note and ' consider well ' that mysterious, unknown, un- 
explored power in nature, which holds their particles together, 
in its wrestling with its opposite; and where it ceases, or seems 
to cease; where that obstinate freedom and predominance is 
vanquished, and by what rules and means; he who finds in 
' water,' arrested * in perforated jars,' or ' flowing through a 
chink,' or resisting gravity, ' if the chink be smaller, or in the 
balanced ' scales,' with their apparent rest, the wrestling forces of 
all nature, — the weaker enslaved, but there, — not annihilated; 
he who saw in the little magnet, beckoning and holding those 
dense palpable masses, or in the lever, assisted by human 
hands, vanquishing its mighty opposite, things that old philo- 
sophies had not dreamt of, — reports of mysteries,— revelations 
for those who have the key, — words from that book of creative 



486 THE CUKE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

power, words from that living Word, which he must study 
who would have his vision of God fulfilled, who would make 
of his f good news ' something more than a Poet's prophecy. 
He who found in the peaceful nitre, in the harmless sulphur, 
in the saltpetre, * villanous ' not yet, in the impotence of fire 
and sulphur, combining in vain against the motion of the 
resisting ball, — not less real to his eye, because not apparent, 
— or in the villanous compound itself, while yet the spark is 
wanting, — 'rules' for other 'wrestling instances,' for other com- 
binations, where the motion of inertia was also to be overcome; 
requiring organized movements, analyses, and combinations of 
forces, not less but more scientifically artistic,— rules for the en- 
largement of forces, waiting but their spark, then, to demon- 
strate, with more fearful explosions, their expansibility, threat- 
ening ' to lay all flat.' 

For here, too, the mystic, unknown, occult powers, the 
unreported actualities, are working still, in obedience to their 
orders, which they had not from man, and taking no note of 
his. ' For man, as the interpreter of nature, does, and under- 
stands as much as his observations ON THE ORDER OF THINGS, 
or the mind, permits him, and neither knows nor is capable of 
more.' ' Man, while operating, can only apply or withdraw 
natural bodies. Nature internally performs the 
rest'; and ' the syllogism forces assent, but not things.' 

Great things this Interpreter promises to man from these 
observations and interpretations, which he and his company 
are ordering; great things he promises from the application of 
this new method of learning to this department of man's want; 
because those vague popular notions — those spontaneous but 
deep-rooted beliefs in man — those confused, perplexed terms, 
with which he seeks to articulate them, and not those acts 
which make up his life only — are out of nature, and all re- 
solvable into higher terms, and require to be returned into 
these before man can -work with them to purpose. 

Great news for man he brings; the powers which are working 
in the human life, and not those which are working without it 
only, are working in obedience to laws. Great things he pro- 



PLAN OF INNOVATION — NEW DEFINITIONS. 487 

mises, because the facts of human life are determined by forces 
which admit of scientific definition, and are capable of being 
reduced to axioms. Great things he promises, for these dis- 
tinctive phenomena of human life, to their most artificial com- 
plication, are all out of the universal nature, and struggling 
already of themselves instinctively towards the scientific solu- 
tion, already ' anticipating' science, and invoking her, and 
waiting and watching for her coming. 

Good news the scientific reporter, in his turn, brings in 
also; good news for the state, good news for man; confirma- 
tions of reports indited beforehand; confirmations, from the 
universal scriptures, of the revelation of the divine in the 
human. Good news, because that law of the greater whole, 
which is the worthier — that law of the common-weal, which 
is the human law — that law which in man is reason and con- 
science, is in the nature of things, and not in man only — nay, 
not in man as yet, but prefigured only — his ideal ; his true 
form — not in man, who ' is' not, but '• becoming.' 

But in tracking these universal laws of being, this constitu- 
tion of things in general into the human constitution — in 
tracing these universal definitions into the specific terms of 
human life — the clearing up of the spontaneous notions and 
beliefs which the mind of man shut up to itself yields — the 
criticism on the terms which pre-occupy this ground is of 
course inevitable, whether expressed or not, and is indeed no 
unimportant part of the result. For this is a philosophy in 
which even 'the most vulgar and casual opinions are something 
more than nothing in nature.' 

This Play of the Common-weal and its scientific cure, in 
which the question of the true NOBILITY is so deeply inwrought 
throughout, is indeed but the filling up of that sketch of the 
constitution of man which we find on another page — that 
constitution whereby man, as man, is part and member of a 
common-weal — that constitution whereby his relation to the 
common-weal is essential to the perfection of his individual 
nature, and that highest good of it which is conservation with 
advancement — that constitution whereby the highest good of 



488 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

the particular and private nature, that which bids defiance to 
the blows of fortune, comprehends necessarily the good of the 
whole in its intention. (' For neither can a man understand 
virtue without relation to society, nor duty without an 
inward disposition.') And that is the reason that the question 
of ' the government of every man over himself/ and the pre- 
dominance of powers, and the wrestling of them in ' the little 
state of man' — the question as to which is ' nobler' — comes 
to be connected with the question of civil government so 
closely. That is the reason that this doctrine of virtue and 
state comes to us conjoined; that is the reason that we find 
this question of the consulship, and the question of heroism 
and personal greatness, the question of the true nobility, form- 
ing so prominent a feature in the Play of the Common-weal, 
inwoven throughout with the question of its cure. 

' Constructions according to true definitions' make the end 
here. The definition is, of course, the necessary preliminary 
to such constructions: it does not in itself suffice. Mere 
science does not avail here. Scientific ARTS, scientific insti- 
tutions of regimen and culture and cure, make the essential 
conditions of success in this enterprise. But we want the 
light of ' the true definitions' to begin with. There is no use 
in revolutions till we have it; and as for empirical institutions, 
mankind has seen the best of them ; — we are perishing in 
their decay, dying piecemeal, going off into a race of ostriches, 
or something of that nature — or threatened with becoming 
mere petrifactions, mineral specimens of what we have been, 
preserved, perhaps, to adorn the museums of some future 
species, gifted with better faculties for maintaining itself. It 
is time for a change of some sort, for the worse or the better, 
when we get habitually, and by a social rule, water for milk, 
brickdust for chocolate, silex for butter, and minerals of one 
kind and another for bread ; when our drugs give the lie to 
science; when mustard refuses to f counter-irritate,' and sugar 
has ceased to be sweet, and pepper, to say nothing of ' ginger' 
is no longer ' hot in the mouth.' The question in speculative 
philosophy at present is — 



PLAN OF INNOVATION — NEW DEFINITIONS. 489 

' Why all these things change from their ordinance, 
Their natures, and jore-formed faculties, 
To monstrous quality.' 

— 'There's something in this more than natural, — ii philo- 
sophy could find it out.' 

And what we want in practical philosophy when it comes to 
this, is a new kind of enchantments, with capacities large 
enough to swallow up these, as the rod of Moses swallowed 
up the rods of the Egyptians. That was a good test of authority ; 
and nothing short of that will answer our present purpose; 
when not that which makes life desirable only, but life itself 
is assailed, and in so comprehensive a manner, the revolutionary 
point of sufferance and stolidity is reached. We cannot stay 
to reason it thus and thus with ' the garotte ' about our throats : 
the scientific enchantments will have to be tried now, tried 
here also. Now that we have ' found out ' oxygen and 
hydrogen, and do not expect to alter their ways of proceeding 
by any epithets that we may apply to them, or any kind of 
hocus-pocus that we may practise on them, it is time to see 
what gen, or genus it is, that proceeds in these departments 
in so successful a manner, and with so little regard to 
our exorcisms; and the mere calling of names, which indicate 
in a general way the unquestionable fact of a degeneracy, is 
of no use, for that has been thoroughly tried already. 

The experiment in the c common logic/ as Lord Bacon calls 
it, has been a very long and patient one; the historical result 
is, that it forces assent, and not things. 

The question here is not of divinity, as some might suppose. 
There is no question about that. Nobody need be troubled 
about that. It does not depend on this, or that man's argu- 
ments, happily. The true divinity, the true inspiration, is of 
that which was and shall be. Its foundations are laid, — its 
perennial source is found, not in the soul of man, not in the 
constitution of the mind of man only, but in the nature of 
things, and in the universal laws of being. The true divinity 
strikes its foundations to the universal granite; it is built on 



490 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

f that rock where philosophy and divinity join close;' and 
heaven and earth may pass, but not that. 

The question here is of logic. The question is between 
Lord Bacon and Aristotle, and which of these two thrones 
and dominions in speculation and practice the moderns are 
disposed on the whole to give their suffrages to, in this most 
vital department of human practice, in this most vital com- 
mon human concern and interest. The question is of these 
demoniacal agencies that are at large now upon this planet — 
on both sides of it — going about with ' tickets of leave' of 
one kind and another; for the logic that we employ in this 
department still, though it has been driven, with hooting, out 
of every other, and the rude systems of metaphysics which it 
sustains, do not take hold of these things. They pay no 
attention to our present method of reasoning about them. 
There is no objection to syllogisms, as Lord Bacon concedes; — 
they are very useful in their proper place. The difficulty is, 
that the subtlety of nature in general, as exhibited in that 
result which we call fact, far surpasses the subtlety of nature, 
when developed within that limited sphere, which the mind 
of man makes; and nature is much more than a match for 
him, when he throws himself upon his own internal gifts of 
ratiocination, and undertakes to dictate to the universe. The 
difficulty is just this; — here we have it in a nut-shell, as we 
are apt to get it in Lord Bacon's aphorisms. 

' The syllogism consists of propositions ; these of words. 
Words are the signs of notions: notions represent things: [If 
these last then] — if our notions are fantastical, the whole 
structure falls to the ground. But [they are~\ they are, for 
the most part, improperly abstracted, and deduced from things,' 
and that is the difficulty which this new method of learning, 
propounded in connection with this so radical criticism of the 
old one, undertakes to remedy. For there are just two methods 
of learning, as he goes on to tell us, with increasing, but 
cautious, amplifications. The false method lays down from 
the very outset some abstract and useless generalities, — the 
other, gradually rises to those principles which are really the 



PLAN OF INNOVATION — NEW DEFINITIONS. 49 1 

most common in nature/ ' Axioms determined on in argu- 
ment, can never assist in the discovery of new effects, for the 
subtlety of nature is vastly superior to that of argument. But 
axioms properly and regularly abstracted from particulars, 
easily point out and define new particulars, and impart 
activity to the sciences. 

' We are wont to call that human reasoning which we apply 
to nature, the anticipation of nature (as being rash 
and premature), and that which is properly deduced from 

THINGS, THE INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. — (A radical 

distinction, which it is the first business of the new machine 
of the mind to establish). ' Anticipations are sufficiently 
powerful in producing unanimity; for if men were all to 
become even uniformly mad, they might agree tolerably well 
with each other,' (but not with nature ; there 's the trouble ; 
that is the assent that is wanting). 

' In sciences founded upon opinions and dogmas, it is right 
to make use of anticipations and logic, if you wish to force 
assent, and not things.' 

The difference, then, between the first hasty conceptions 
and rude theories of the nature of things, — the difference 
between the preconceptions which make the first steps of the 
human mind towards the attainment of truth, and those con- 
ceptions and axioms which are properly abstracted from things, 
and which correspond to their natures, is the difference in 
which science begins. 

And we shall find that the truths of science in this depart- 
ment of it, which makes our present subject are quite as new, 
quite as far out of the road of common opinion, and quite as 
unattainable by the old method of learning, as those truths 
with which science has already overpowered the popular 
notions and theories in those departments in which its powers 
have been already tested. 

These rude natural products of the human understanding, 
while it is yet undisciplined by the knowledge of nature in 
general, which in their broadest range proceed from the 
human speciality, and are therefore liable to an exterior 



492 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

criticism; these first words and natural beliefs of men, 
through all their range, from the a priori conceptions of the 
schools, down to the most narrow and vulgar preconceptions 
and prejudices of the unlearned, the author of the ' Novum 
Organum,' and of the ' Advancement of Learning,' by a bold 
and dexterous sweep, puts quietly into one category, under 
the seemingly fanciful, — but, considering the time, none too 
fanciful, — designation of 'the Idols'; — (he knew, indeed, 
that the original of the term would suggest to the scholar a 
more literal reading), — • the Idols of the Tribe, of the Den, 
of the Market, and of the Theatre,' as he sees reason — scien- 
tific, as well as rhetorical reason, — for dividing and dis- 
tinguishing them. But under that common designation of 
images, and false ones too, he subjects them to a common 
criticism, in behalf of that mighty hitherto unknown, un- 
sought, universality, which is all particulars — which is more 
universal than the notions of men, and transcends the grasp 
of their beliefs and pre-judgments; — that universal fact which 
men are brought in contact with, in all their doing, and in all 
their suffering, whether pleasurable or painful. That universal, 
actual fact, whose science philosophy has hitherto set aside, in 
favour of its own pre-notions, as a thing not worth taking into 
the account, — that mystic, occult, unfathomed fact, that is 
able to assert itself in the face of our most authoritative pre- 
notions, whose science, under the vulgar name of experience, 
all the learning of the world had till then made over with a 
scorn ineffable to the cultivation of the unlearned. Under 
that despised name which the old philosophy had omitted in 
its chart, the new perceived that the ground lay, and made all 
sail thither. 

We cannot expect to find then any of those old terms and 
definitions included in the trunk of the new system, which is 
science. None of those airy fruits that grow on the branches 
which those old roots of a false metaphysics must needs nur- 
ture, — none of those apples of Sodom which these have mocked 
us with so long, shall the true seeker find on these boughs. The 
man of science does not, indeed^ care to displace those terms in 



PLAN OF INNOVATION — NEW DEFINITIONS. 493 

the popular dialect here, any more than the chemist or the 
botanist will insist on reforming the ordinary speech of men 
with their truer language in the fields they occupy. The new 
Logician and Metaphysician will himself, indeed, make use of 
these same terms, with a hint to ' men of understanding/ per- 
haps, as to the sense in which he uses them. 

Incorporated into a system of learning on which much 
human labour has been bestowed, they may even serve some 
good practical purposes under certain conditions of social 
advancement. And besides, they are useful for adorning 
discourse, and furnish abundance of rhetorical material. Above 
all, they are invaluable to the scholastic controversialists, and 
the new philosopher will not undertake to displace them in 
these fields. He steadfastly refuses to come into any collision 
with them. He leaves them to take their way without. He 
makes them over to the vulgar, and to those old-fashioned 
schools of logic and metaphysics, whose endless web is spun 
out of them. But when the question is of practice, that is 
another thing. It is the scientific word that is wanting here. 
That is the word which in his school he will undertake to 
teach. 

When it comes to practice, professional practice, like the 
botanist and the chemist, he will make his own terms. He 
has a machine expressly for that purpose, by which new terms 
are framed and turned out in exact accordance with the nature 
of things. He does not wish to quarrel with any one, but in 
the way of his profession, he will have none of those old con- 
fused terms thrust upon him. He will examine them, and 
analyze them ; and all, — all that is in them, — all, and more, 
will be in his; but scientifically cleared, ' divided with the 
mind, that divine fire/ and clothed with power. 

And it is just as impossible that those changes for the 
human relief which the propounder of the New Logic pro- 
pounded as its chief end, should ever be effected by means of 
the popular terms which our metaphysicians are still allowed 
to retain in the highest fields of professional practice, as it 
would have been to effect those lesser reforms which this logic 



494 THE CURE OF THE COMMON- WEAL. 

has already achieved, if those old elementary terms, earth, 
fire, air, water, — terms which antiquity thought fine enough; 
which passed the muster of the ancient schools without sus- 
picion, had never to this hour been analyzed. 

It is just as easy to suppose that we could have had our 
magnetic telegraphs, and daguerreotypes, and our new Materia 
Medica, and all the new inventions of modern science for 
man's relief, if the terms which were simple terms in the 
vocabulary of Aristotle and Pliny, had never been tested with 
the edge of the New Machine, and divided with its divine 
fire, if they had not ceased to be in the schools at least 
elementary; it is just as easy to suppose this, as it is to sup- 
pose that the true and nobler ends of science can ever be 
attained, so long as the powers that are actual in our human 
life, which are still at large in all their blind instinctive 
demoniacal strength there, which still go abroad free-footed, 
unfettered of science there, while we chain the lightning, and 
send it on our errands, — so long as these still slip through the 
ring of our airy ' words,' still riot in the freedom of our large 
generalizations, our sublime abstractions, — so long as a mere 
human word-ology is suffered to remain here, clogging all with 
its deadly impotence, — keeping out the true generalizations 
with their grappling-hooks on the particulars, — the creative 
word of art which man learns from the creating wisdom, — 
the word to which rude nature bows anew, — the word which 
is Power. 

But while the world is resounding with those new relations 
to the powers of nature which the science of nature has 
established in other fields, in that department of it, which its 
Founder tells us is ' the end and term of Natural Science in 
the intention of man/ in that department of it to which his 
labor was directed; we are still given over to the inventions 
of Aristotle, applied to those rude conceptions and theories of 
the nature of things which the unscientific ages have left to 
us. Here we have still the loose generalization, the untested 
affirmation, the arrogant pre-conception, the dogmatic assump- 
tion. Here we have the mere phenomena of the human 



PLAN OF INNOVATION — NEW DEFINITIONS. 495 

speciality put forward as science, without any attempt to find 
their genera, — to trace them to that which is more known to 
nature, so as to connect them practically with the diversity 
and opposition, which the actual conditions of practice 
present. 

We have not, in short, the scientific language here yet. 
The vices and the virtues do not understand the names by 
which we call them, and undertake to command them. Those 
are not the names in that ' infinite book of secresy' which they 
were taught in. They find a more potent order there. 

And thus it is, that the demons of human life go abroad here 
still, impervious alike to our banning and our blessing. The 
powers of nature which are included in the human nature, — 
the powers which in this specific form of them we are under- 
taking to manage with these vulgar generalizations, tacked 
together with the Aristotelian logic — these powers are no 
more amenable to any such treatment in this form, than they 
are in those other forms, in which we are learning to approach 
them with another vocabulary. 

The forces which are developed in the human life will not 
answer to the names by which we call them here, any more 
than the lightning would answer to the old Magician's incan- 
tation, — any more than it would have come if the old Logi- 
cian had called it by his name, — which was just as good as 
the name — and no better, than the name, which the priest of 
Baal gave it, — any more than it would have come, if the old 
Logician had undertaken to fetch it, with the harness of his 
syllogism. 

But when the new Logician, who was the new Magician, 
came, with ' the part operative ' of his speculation, with his 
' New Machine,' with the rod of his new definition, with the 
staff of his genera and species, — when the right name was 
found for it, it heard, it heard afar, it heard in its heaven and 
came. It came fast enough then. It was ' asleep,' but it 
awaked. It was ' taking a journey ' but it came. There was 
no affectation of the graces of the gods when the new inter- 
preter and prophet of nature, who belonged to the new order 



496 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

of Interpreters, sent up his little messenger, without any pomp 
or ceremony, or ' windy suspiration of forced breath,' and 
fetched it. 

But that was an Occidental philosopher, one of the race 
who like to see effects of some kind, when there is nothing 
in the field to forbid it. That was one of the Doctors who 
are called in this system ' Interpreters of nature,' to distinguish 
them from those who ' rashly anticipate ' it. He did not make 
faces, and cut himself with knives and lances, after a pre- 
scribed manner, and prophesy until evening, though there was 
no voice, nor any to answer, nor any that regarded. He knew 
that that god at least would not stop on his journey; or it, 
peradventure, he slept, would not be wakened by any such 
process. 

But the metaphysicians who have this field in their hands do 
not appear to perceive as yet that the logic of e preconceptions 
is just as good-for-nothing for practical purposes in this field 
as in any other, and that mankind, accustomed now to effects 
from speculation in other departments, are beginning to look 
gravely this way, and wonder what the difficulty is with this 
science in particular, claiming such special aids, and yet so 
singularly deficient in that which modern science confesses a 
leaning to, — power, effects, remedies, reliefs, cures, advance- 
ments. 

And the farther the world proceeds on that c new road ' it is 
travelling at present, the more the demand Avill be heard in 
this quarter, for an adaptation of instrumentalities to the 
advanced, and advancing ages of modern learning and civili- 
zation, and to that more severe and exacting genius of the 
occidental races, that keener and more subtle, and practical 
genius, from whose larger requisitions and powers this advance- 
ment proceeds. 



PLAN OF INNOVATION. 497 



CHAPTER X. 

PLAN OF INNOVATION. — NEW CONSTRUCTIONS. 

1 Unless these end in matter, and constructions according to true 
definitions, they are speculative, and of little use.' — Novum Organum. 

PVlFFICULT, then, as tlie problem of Civil Government 
appeared to the eye of the scientific philosopher, and 
threatening and appalling as were those immediate aspects 
of it which it presented at that moment, he does not despair of 
the State. Even on the verge of that momentous political 
and social crisis, ' though he does not need to go to heaven to 
predict great revolutions and imminent changes,' ' he thinks 
he sees ways to save us/ and he finds in his new science of 
Man the ultimate solution of that problem. 

That particular and private nature which is in all men, let 
them re-name themselves by what names they will, that par- 
ticular and private nature which intends always the individual 
and private good, has in itself ' an incident towards the good 
of society/ which it may use as means, — which it must use, if 
highly successful, — as means to its end. Even in this, when 
science has enlightened it, and it is impelled by blind and un- 
successful instinct no longer, the man of science finds a place 
where a pillar of the true state can be planted; even here the 
scientific light lays bare, in the actualities of the human con- 
stitution, a foundation-stone, — a stone that does not crumble — 
a stone that does not roll, which the state that shall stand must 
rest on. 

Even that ' active good,' which impels ' the troublers of the 
world, such as was Lucius Sylla, and infinite others in smaller 
model/ — that principle which impels the particular nature to 
leave its signature on other things, — on the state, on the 

K K 



498 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

world, if it can, — though it is its own end, and though it is 
ape, when armed with those singular powers for ' effecting its 
good will,' which are represented in the hero of this action, to 
lead to results of the kind which this piece represents, — this 
is the principle in man which seeks an individual immortality, 
and works of immortal worth for man are its natural and 
selectest means. 

But that is not all. The bettering of itself, the perfection 
of its own form, is, by the constitution of things, a force, a 
motive, an actual ' power in everything that moves.' This is 
one of the primal, universal, natural motions. It is in the 
universal creative stamp of tilings; and strong as that is, the 
rock on which here, too, the hope of science rests — strong as 
that is, the pillar of the state, which here, too, it will rear. 
For to man the highest 'passive good,' and this, too, is of the 
good which is ' private and particular,' is, constitutionally, that 
whereby ' the conscience of good intentions, however suc- 
ceeding, is a more continual joy to his nature than all the 
provision — the most luxurious provision — which can be made 
for security and repose, — whereby the mere empirical experi- 
menter in good will count it a higher felicity to fail in good 
and virtuous ends towards the public, than to attain the most 
envied success limited to his particular. 

Thus, even in these decried 'private ' motives, which actuate 
all men — these universal natural instincts, which impel men 
yet more intensely, by the concentration of the larger sensi- 
bility, and the faculty of the nobler nature of their species, to 
seek their own private good, — even in these forces, which, un- 
enlightened and uncounterbalanced, tend in man to war and 
social dissolution, or ' monstrous ' social combination, — even in 
these, the scientific eye perceives the basis of new structures, 
' constructions according to true definitions,' in which all the 
ends that nature in man grasps and aspires to, shall be artis- 
tically comprehended and attained. 

But this is only the beginning of the scientific politician's 

' hope.' This is but a collateral aid, an incidental assistance. 

This is the place on his ground-plan for the buttresses of the 



NEW CONSTRUCTIONS — THE INITIATIVE. 499 

pile he will rear. There is an unborrowed foundation, there 
is an internal support for the state in man. For along with 
that particular and private nature of good, there is another in 
all men; — there is another motive, which respects and beholds 
the good of society, not mediately, but directly as its end, — 
which embraces in its intention ' the form of human nature, 
whereof we are members and portions, and not — not — our 
own proper, individual form ' ; and this is the good c which is 
in degree the greater and the worthier, because it tends to the 
conservation and advancement of a more general form.' And 
this, also, is an actual force in man, proceeding from the uni- 
versal nature of things and original in that, not in him. This, 
also, is in the primeval creative stamp of things; and here, 
also, the science of the interpretation of nature finds in the 
constitution of man, and in the nature of things, the founda- 
tions of the true state ready to its hand; and hewn, all hewn 
and cut, and joined with nature's own true and cunning hand 
ere man was, the everlasting pillars of the common- weal. 

But in man this law, also, — this law chiefly, — has its special, 
essentially special, development. f It is much more impressed 
on man, if he de-generate not.' Great buildings have been 
reared on this foundation already; great buildings, old and 
time-honoured, stand on it. The history of human nature is 
glorious, even in its degeneracy, with the exhibition of this 
larger, nobler form of humanity asserting itself, triumphing 
over the intensities of the narrower motivity. It is a species 
in which the organic law transcends the individual, and 
embraces the kind; it is a constitution of nature, in which 
those who seek the good of the kind, and subordinate the 
private nature to that, are noble, and chief. It is a species 
in which the law of the common-weal is for ever present 
to the private nature, as the law of its own being, requiring, 
under the pains and penalties of the universal laws of being, 
subjection. 

Science cannot originate new forces in nature. ' Man, while 
opei-ating, can only apply or withdraw natural forces. Nature, 
internally, performs the rest/ But here are the very forces 

K K 2 



500 THE CUKE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

that we want. If man were, indeed, naturally and constitu- 
tionally, that mere species of ' vermin ' which, under certain 
modes of culture, with great facility he becomes, there would 
be no use in spending words upon this subject. Science could 
not undertake the common-weal in that case. If nature's word 
had been here dissolution, isolation, single intention in the 
parts and members of that body that science sought to frame, 
what word of creative art could she pronounce, what bonds of 
life could she find, what breath of God could she boast, that 
she should think to frame of such material the body politic, 
the organic whole, the living, free, harmonious, triumphant 
common-weal. 

But here are the very forces that we want, blindly moving, 
moving in the dark, left to intuition and instinct, where nature 
had provided reason, and required science and scientific art. 
That has not been tried. And that is why this question 
of the state, dark as it is, portentous, hopeless as its aspects are, 
if we limit the survey to our present aids and instrumentalities, 
is already, to the eye of science, kindling with the aurora of 
unimagined change, advancements to the heights of man's 
felicity, that shall dim the airy portraiture of poets' visions, 
that shall outgo here, too, the world's young dreams with its 
scientific reality. 

There has been no help from science in this field hitherto. 
The proceeding of the world has been instinctive and em- 
pirical thus far, in the attainment of the ends which the com- 
plex nature of man requires him to seek. Men have been 
driven, and swayed hither and thither, by these different and 
apparently contradictory aims, without any science of the 
forces that actuated them. Those ends these forces will seek, 
— 'it is their nature to,' — whether in man, or in any other 
form in which they are incorporated. There's no amount of 
declamation that is ever going to stop them. The power that 
is in everything that moves, the forces of universal nature are 
concerned in the acts that we deprecate and cry out upon. It 
is the original constitution of things, as it was settled in that 
House of Commons, to whose acts the memory of Man runneth 



PLAN OF INNOVATION. 501 

not, that is concerned in these demonstrations; and philosophy 
requires that whatever else we do, we should avoid, by all 
means, coming into any collision with those statutes. ' We 
must so order it/ says Michael of the Mountain, quoting in 
this case from antiquity — ' we must so order it, as by no 
means to contend with universal nature.' ' To attempt to 
kick against natural necessity/ he says in his own name, and 
in his own peculiar and more impressive method of philosophic 
instruction — ' to attempt to kick against natural necessity, is 
to represent the folly of Ctesiphon, who undertook to outkick 
his mule.' We must begin by distinguishing 'what is in our 
power, and what not/ says the author of the Advancement of 
Learning, applying that universal rule of practice to our 
present subject. 

Here, then, carefully reduced to their most comprehensive 
form, traced to the height of universal nature, and brought 
down to the specific nature in man — here, as they lie on the 
ground of the common nature in man, for the first time scien- 
tifically abstracted — are the powers which science has to begin 
with in this field. The varieties in the species, and the indivi- 
dual differences so remarkable in this kind, are not in this place 
under consideration. But here is the common nature in this 
kind, which must make the basis of any permanent universal 
social constitution for it. Different races will require that 
their own constitutional differences shall be respected in their 
social constitutions ; and if they be not, for the worse or for 
the better, look for change. But this is the universal plat- 
form that science is clearing here. This is the WORLD that she 
is concerning herself with here, in the person of that High 
Priest of hers, who, also, took that to be his business. 

Here are these powers in man, then, to begin with. Here is 
this universal natural predisposition in him, not to subsist, 
merely, and maintain his form — which is nature's first law, 
they tell us — but to .' better himself ' in some way. As 
Hamlet expresses it, 'he lacks advancement'; and advance- 
ment he will have, or strive to have, if not 'formal and essen- 
tial,' then 'local/ He is instinctively impelled to it; and in 



502 . THE CURE OP THE COMMON-WEAL. 

his ignorant attempt to compass that end which nature has 
prescribed to him, the 'tempest of human life' arises. 

The scientific plan will be, not to quarrel with these uni- 
versal forces, and undertake to found society on their annihila- 
tion. Science will count that structure unsafe which is founded 
on the supposed annihilation of these forces in anything that 
moves. The man of science knows, that though by the pre- 
dominance of powers, or by the equilibrium of them, they may 
be for a time, ' as it were, annihilated,' they are in every crea- 
ture; and nature in the instincts, though blind, is cunning, 
and finds ways and means of overcoming barriers, and evading 
restrictions, and inclines to indemnify herself when once she 
finds her way again. Instead of quarrelling with these forces, 
the scientific plan, having respect to the Creating Wisdom in 
the constitution of man, overlooking them from that height, 
will thankfully accept them, and make much of them. These 
are just the motive powers that science has need of; she could 
not compose her structure without them, which is only the 
perfecting of the structure which the great Creating Wisdom 
had already outlined and pre-ordered — not a machine, but a 
living organic whole. 

Science takes this ' piece of work' as she finds him, ready, 
waiting for the hand of art — imperfect, unfinished, but with 
the proceeding of nature incorporated in him — with the crea- 
tive, advancing, perfecting motion, incorporated in him as his 
essence and law; — imperfect, but with nature working within 
him for the rest, urging him to self-perfection. She takes 
him as she finds him, a creature of instinct, but with his large, 
rich, undeveloped, yet already active nature of reason, and 
conscience, and religion, already struggling for the mastery, 
counterbalancing his narrower motivity, holding in check, 
with nobler intuitions, the error of an instinct which errs in 
man, because eyes were included in nature's definition of him, 
as it was written beforehand in her book, her universal book 
of types and orders — eyes, and not instinct only — 'that 
what he cannot smell out, he may spy into.' ' O'er that art, 
which you say adds to nature, is an ait that nature makes.' 



PLAN OF INNOVATION. 503 

The want of this pre-ordered art is the want here still. The 
war of the unenlightened instincts is raging here still. That 
is where the difficulty lies. That same patience of investigation 
with which science has pursued and found out nature else- 
where — that same intense, indefatigable concentration of en- 
deavour, which has been rewarded with such ' magnitude of 
effects' in other fields — that same, in a higher degree, in 
more powerful combinations, proportioned to the magnitude 
and common desirableness of the object, is what is wanting 
here. It is the instincts that are at fault here, ■ — ' the blind 
instincts, that seeing reason' should ' guide.' 

That is where all the jar and confusion of this great storm 
begins, that ' continues still/ and blasts our lives, in spite of all 
the spells that we mumble over it, and in spite of all the magic 
that all our magicians can bring to bear on it. ' Meagre suc- 
cess,' at least, is still the word here. No wonder that the 
storm continues, under such conditions. No wonder that the 
world is full of the uproar of this arrested work, this violated 
intent of nature. She will storm on till we hear her. Woe 
to those who put themselves in opposition to her, who think 
to violate her intent and prosper ! ' The storm continues,' 
and it will continue, pronounce on it what incantations we 
may, so long as the elemental forces of all nature are meeting 
in our lives, and dashing in blind elemental strength against 
each other, and the brooding spirit of the social life, the com- 
posing spirit of the larger whole, cannot reconcile them, 
because the voices that are filling the air with the discord of 
their controversy, and out-toning the noise of this battle with 
theirs, are crying in one key, ' Let there be darkness here'; 
because the darkness of the ages of instinct and intuition is 
held back here, cowering, ashamed, but forbidden to flee away; 
because the night of human ignorance still covers all this 
battle-ground, and hides the combatants. 

Science is the word here. The Man of the Modern Ages 
has spoken it, ' and now the times give it proof ; the times in 
which the methods of earlier ages, in the rapid advancement 
of learning in other fields, are losing their vitalities, and leav- 



504 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

ing us without those means of social combination, without 
those social bonds which the rudest ages of instinct and intui- 
tion, which the most barbaric peoples have been able to com- 
mand. The times give it proof, fearful proof, terrific proof, 
when the noblest institutions of earlier ages are losing their 
power to conserve the larger whole; when the conserving 
faith of earlier ages, with its infinities of forces, is fainting in 
its struggles, and is not supported; and men set at nought its 
divine realities, because they have not been translated into 
their speech and language, and think there is no such thing; 
and under all the exterior splendours of a material civilization 
advanced by science, society tends to internal decay, and the 
primal war of atoms. 

To meet the exigencies of a crisis like this, it is not enough 
to call these powers that are actual in the human nature, but 
which are not yet reconciled and reduced to their true and 
natural order — it is not enough at this age of the world, at 
this stage of human advancement in other fields — to call these 
forces by some general names which include their oppositions, 
and to require for want of skill that a part of them shall be 
annihilated ; it is not enough to express a strong disapproba- 
tion of the result as it is, and to require, in never-so-authorita- 
tive manner, that it shall be otherwise. No matter what 
names we may use to make that requisition in, no matter under 
what pains and penalties we require it, the result — whatever we 
may say to the contrary — the result does not follow. That 
is not the way. Those who try it, and who continue to try 
it in the face of no matter what failures, may think it is; but 
there is a voice mightier than theirs, drowning all their speech, 
telling us in thunder-tones, that it is not; with arguments 
that brutes might understand, telling us that it is not ! 

It is, indeed, no small gain in the rude ages of warring 
instincts and intuitions, when there is as yet no science to 
define them, and compare them, and pronounce from its calm 
height its eternal axioms here — when the world is a camp, 
and hostilities are deified, and mankind is in arms when all 
the moral terms are still wrapped in the confusion of the first 



PLAN OF INNOVATION. 505 

outgoing of the perplexed, unanalysed human motivity — it is 
no small gain to get the word of the nobler intuitions out- 
spoken, to get the word of the divine law of man's nature, his 
essential law pronounced — even in rudest ages overawing, 
commanding with its awtul divinity the intenser motivity of 
the lesser nature — able to summon, in rudest ages, to its ideal 
heights, those colossal heroic forms, that cast their long sha- 
dows over the tracts of time, to tell us what type it is that 
humanity aspires to. j It is no small gain to get these nobler 
intuitions outspoken in some voice that commands with its 
authority the world's ear, or illustrated in some exemplar that 
arrests the world's eye, and draws the human heart unto it. 

It is no small advance in human history, to get the divine 
authority of those nobler intuitions, which, in man, anti- 
cipate speculation, and their right to command the par- 
ticular motives, recognised in the common speech of men, 
incorporated in their speculative belief, incorporated in their 
books of learning, and embalmed in institutions that keep 
the divine exemplar of the human form for ever in our 
eyes. It is something. The warring nations war on. The 
world is in arms still. The rude instincts are not stayed in 
their intent. They pause, it maybe; ' but a roused passion 
sets them new a-work.' The speckled demons, that the dege- 
nerate angelic nature breeds, put on the new livery, and go 
abroad in it rejoicing. New rivers of blood, new seas of 
carnage, are opened in the new name of peace; new engines 
of torture, of fiendish wrong, are invented in the new name of 
love. But it is some gain. There is a new rallying- place, on 
the earth for those who seek truly the higher good ; at the foot 
of the new symbol they recognise each other, they join hand in 
hand, and the bands of those who wait and watch amid the 
earth's darkness for the promise, cheer us with their songs. 
Truths out of the Eternal Book, truths that all hearts lean on 
in their need, are spoken. Words that shall never pass away, 
sweet with the immortal hope and perennial joy of life, are 
always in our ears. 

The nations that have contributed to this result in any 



506 THE CURE OF THE COMMON- WEAL. 

degree, whether primarily or secondarily, whether they be 
Syrians or Assyrians, Arabs or Egyptians, wandering or settled, 
wild or tame; whether they belong to the inferior unanalysing 
Semitic races, or whether they come of the more richly en- 
dowed, but yet youthful, Indo-European stock ; whether 
they be Hebrews or Persians, Greeks or Romans, will always 
have the world's gratitude. Those to whose intenser concep- 
tions and bolder affirmations, in the rude ages of instinct and 
spontaneous allegation, it was given to pronounce and put on 
everlasting record, these primal truths of inspiration, — truths 
whose divinity all true hearts respond to, may be indeed by 
their natural intellectual characteristics, — if Semitic must be 

— totally disqualified by ethnological laws, — hopelessly dis- 
qualified — so hopelessly that it is to lose all to put it on them 

— for the task of commanding, in detail, our modern civiliza- 
tion ; — a civilization which has made, already, the rude ethics 
of these youthful races, when it comes to details, so palpably 
and grossly inapplicable, that it is an offence to modern sensi- 
bility to name — to so much as name — decisions which stand 
unreversed, without comment, in our books of learning. But 
that is no reason why we should not take, and thankfully ap- 
propriate as the gift of God, all that it was their part to con- 
tribute to the great plot of human advancement. We cannot 
afford to dispense with any such gain. The movement which 
respects the larger whole, the divine intent incorporates it 
all. 

' Japhet shall dwell in the tents of Shem,' for they are 
world wide ; but wo to him if, in his day, he refuse to build 
the temple which, in his day, his God will also require of him. 
Wo to him, if he think to put upon another age and race the 
tasks which his Task-Master will require of him, — which, 
with his many gifts, with his chief gifts, with his ten talents, 
will surely be required of him. More than his fathers' woe 
upon him — more than that old-world woe, which he, too, re- 
members, if he think to lean on Asia, the youthful Asia, when 
his own great world noon-day has come. 

' There was violence on the earth in those days, and it 



/ 



PLAN OF INNOVATION. 507 

repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth.' 
'Twill come,' says our own poet, prefacing his proposal for a 
scientific art in the attainment of the chief human ends, and 
giving his illustrated reasons for it, — ■ 

'Twill come [at this rate] 
Humanity must, perforce, prey on itself, 
Like monsters of the deep. 

But what are these? — these new orders, — these new species 
of nature, defying nature, that we are generating with our 
arts here now ? What are these new varieties to which our 
kind is tending now? Look at this kind for instance. What 
are these? Define them. Destroyers, not of their own 
image in their fellow-man only, not of the image of their 
kind only, — sacred by natural universal laws, — but of the 
chosen image of it, the ideal of it, the one in whom the 
natural love of their kind was by the law of nature concentred, 
— the wife and the mother, — destroyed not as the wolf des- 
troys its prey, but with ferocity, or with prolonged and stu- 
dious harm, that it required the human brain to plan and per- 
petrate. Look at this pale lengthening widening train of 
their victims. We must look at it. It will never go by till 
we do. We shall have to look at it, and consider it well; it 
will lengthen, it will widen till we do: — ghastly, bruised, 
bleeding, trampled, — trampled it may be, with nailed, booted 
heel, mother and child together into one grave. But these are 
common drunkard's wives; — we are inured to this catastrophe, 
and do not think much of it. But who are these, whom the 
grave cannot hold ; that by God's edict break its bonds and 
come back, making day hideous, to tell us what the earth 
could not, would not keep, — to tell us of that other band who 
died and made no sign? But this is nothing. Here are 
more. Here are others. What are these? These are not 
spectres. Their cheeks are red enough. What loathsome 
thing is this, that we are bringing forth here now with the 
human face upon it, in whom the heart of the universal nature 
has expired. These are murderers, — count them — they are 



508 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

all murderers, wholesale murderers, perhaps, — but of what? 
Of their own helpless, tender, loving, trusting little ones. 
The wretched children of our time, — alone in wretchedness, — 
alone in the universe of nature, — who found, where nature 
promised them a mother's love, the knife, or the more cruel 
agonizing drug of death. Was there any cause in nature for 
it ? Yes. They did it for the ' burial fee/ perhaps, or for 
some other cause as good. They had a reason for it. Let our 
naturalists throw their learning ' to the dogs,' and come this 
way, and tell us what this means. Nay, let them bring their 
books with them, and example us with its meaning if they 
can. Let them tell us what ' depth ' in which nature hides 
her failures, or yet unperfected hideous germinations, — what 
formation in which she buries the kinds she repents that she has 
made upon the earth, or what ' deep ' — what ocean cave of 
' monsters ' we shall drag to find our kindred in these species. 
Let our wise men tell us whether there be, or whether there 
ever was, any such thing as this in nature before. If ' such 
things are,' or have been in any other kind, let them produce 
the instances, and keep us in countenance and console us for 
our own. 

Let them look at that murderer too, and interpret him for 
us. For he too is waiting to be interpreted, and he will 
wait till we understand his signs. He is speaking mute 
nature's language to us; we must get her key. Look at him 
as he stands there in the dark, subordinating that faculty 
which comprehends the whole, which recognises the divinity 
of his neighbour's right, to his fiendish end : preparing with 
the judgment of a man his little piece of machinery, with 
which he will take, as he would take a salmon, or a rat, 
his fellow-man. Look at him as he stands there now, listening 
patiently for your steps, waiting to strangle you as you go by 
him unarmed to-night, confiding in your fellow-man; waiting 
to drag you down from all the hopes and joys of life, for the 
sake of the loose coin, gold or silver, which he thinks he 
may find about you, — perhaps? ' How to KILL vermin and 
how to prevent the fiend] was Tom's study. How to 



PLAN OF INNOVATION. 509 

dispatch in the most agreeable and successful manner, crea- 
tures whose notions of good are constitutionally and diametri- 
cally opposed to the good of the larger whole, who have no 
sensibility to that, and no faculty whereby they perceive it to 
be the worthier; that is no doubt one part of the problem. 
The scientific question is, whether this creature be really what 
it seems, a new and more horrid kind of beast — a demoral- 
ization and deterioration of the human species into that. If 
it be, let our naturalists come to our aid here also, and teach 
us how to hunt him down and despatch him, with as much 
respect to the natural decencies which the fact of the external 
human form would seem still to exact from us, as the circum- 
stances will admit of. Is it the beast, or is it ' the fiend?' — 
that is the question. The fiend which tells us that the angelic 
or divine nature is there — there still — overborne, trampled on, 
' as it were, annihilated/ but lighting that gleam of ' wicked- 
ness,' — making of it, not instinct, but crime. Ah ! we need 
not ask which it is. This one has told his own story, if we 
could but read it. He has left — he is leaving all the time, 
contributions, richest contributions to our natural history of 
man, — that history which must make the basis of our arts of 
cure. He was a wolf when you took him; but in his cell you 
found something else in him — did you not ? — something 
that troubled and appalled you, with its kindred and likeness, 
and its exaction on your sympathy. When you hung him as 
you would not hang a dog ; — when you put him to a death 
which you would think it indecent and inhuman to award to 
a creature of another species, you did not find him that. 
The law of the nobler nature lay in him as it were annihi- 
lated; he thought there was no such thing; but when nature's 
great voice was heard without also, and those ' bloody instruc- 
tions he had taught returned to him'; when that voice of the 
people, which was the voice of God to him, echoed with its 
doom the voice within, and ' sweet religion,' with its divine 
appeals — 'a rhapsody of words' no longer, came, to second 
that great argument, — the blind instincts were overpowered 
in him, the lesser usurping nature was dethroned, — the angelic 



510 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

nature arose, and had her hour, and shed parting gleams of 
glory on those fleeting days and nights; and he came forth to 
die at last, not dragged like a beast — with a manly step — 
with heroic grandeur, vindicating the heroic type in nature, 
of that form he wore, — vindicating the violated law, accept- 
ing his doom, bowing to its ignominy, a man, a member of 
society, — a reconciled and accepted member of the common- 
weal. 

How to prevent the fiend? is the question. Ah! what un- 
lettered forces are these, unlearned still, with all our learning, 
that the dark, unaided wrestling hour ' in the little state of 
man,' leaves at the head of affairs there, seated in its chair of 
state, crowned, ' predominant,' to speak the word of doom for 
us all. ' He poisons him in the garden for his estate.' 
' Lights, lights, lights ! ' is the word here. There is a cause in 
nature for these hard hearts, but it is not in the constitution 
of man. There is a cause; it is nature herself, crying out 
upon our learning, asking to be — interpreted. 

Woe for the age whose universal learning is in forms that 
move and command no longer; that move and bind no longer 
with/ear, or hope, or love, ' the common people.' Woe for the 
people who think that the everlasting truths of being — the 
eternal laws of science — are things for saints, and school- 
masters, and preachers only, — the people who carry about 
with them in secret, for week-day purposes, Edmund's creed, 
to whom nature is already ' their goddess, and their law,' ere 
they know her or her law — ere the appointed teacher has 
instructed them in it, — ere they know what divinity she, too, 
holds to, — ere the interpreter has translated into her speech, 
and evolved from her books, the old truths which shall not — 
though their old ' garments ' should ' be changed" 1 — which shall 
not pass away. Woe for the nations in whom that greater 
part that carries it, are godless, or whose vows are paid in 
secret to Edmund's goddess, — whose true faith is in appetite, — 
who have no secret laws imposed on that. ' Woe to the people 
who are in such a case,' no matter on which side of the ocean 
they may dwell, in the old world, or a new one; no matter 



PLAN OF INNOVATION. 511 

under what political constitutions. No matter under what 
favourable external conditions, the national development that 
has that hollow in it, may proceed; no matter under what 
glorious and before uuimagined conditions of a healthful, 
noble human development that development may proceed. 
Alas ! for such a people. The rulers may cry ' Peace !' but there 
is none. And, alas ! for the world in which such a power is 
growing up under new conditions, and waxing strong, and 
preparing for its leaps. 

f As a principle of social or political organisation, there is no \ 
religion, — there never has been any, — so fatal as none. 
That is a truth of which all history is an illustration. It is 
one which has been illustrated in the history of modern states, 
not less vividly than in the history of antiquity. And it will 
continue to be illustrated, on the same grand scale, in those 
terrific evils which the dissolution, or the dissoluteness of the 
larger whole creates, whenever the appointed teachers of a 
nation, the inductors of it into its highest learning, lag behind 
the common mind, in their interpretations, and leave it to the 
people to construct their own rude ' tables of rejections' ; when- 
ever the practical axioms, which are the inevitable vintage of 
these undiscriminating and fatally false rejections, are suffered 
to become history. 

' Woe to the land when its king is a child'; but thrice woe 
to it, when its teacher is a child. Alas ! for the world, when 
the pabulum of her youthful visions and anticipations of learn- 
ing have become meat for men, the prescribed provision for 
that nature in which man must live, or ' cease to be,' amid the 
sober realities of western science. 

' Thou shouldst not have been old before thy time! 

'The glow-worm shows the matin to be near, 
And 'gins to pale his ineffectual fire.' 



512 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 



CHAPTER XI. 

NEW CONSTRUCTIONS — THE INITIATIVE. 

Pyramus. — ' Write me a prologue, and let the prologue seem to say, 
we will do no harm with our swords [spears] . . . and for the more bet- 
ter assurance, tell them that I, Pyramus, am not Pyramus, but Bottom 
the weaver. This will put them out of fear.' — Shake-spear. 

' Truth and reason are common to every one, and are no more his 
who spoke them first, than his who spoke them after. Who follows 
another follows nothing, finds nothing, seeks nothing. 

' Authors have hitherto communicated themselves to the people by 
some particular and foreign mark. 7, the first of any, by my univer- 
sal being. Every man carries with him the entire form of human con- 
dition. 

1 And besides, though I had a particular distinction by myself, what 
can it distinguish when I am no more? Can it point out and favor 
inanity ? 

' But will thy manes such a gift bestow 
As to make violets from thy ashes grow ? ' 

Michael de Montaigne. 

Hamlet. — ' To thine own self be true, 

And it doth follow as the night the day 
Thou canst not then be false to any man.' 
1 To know a man well, were to know him-self.' 

fpHE complaint of the practical men against the philosophers 
-*~ who make such an outcry upon the uses and customs of 
the world as they find it, that they do not undertake to give us 
anything better in the place of them ; or if they do, with their 
terrible experiments they leave us worse than they find us, 
does not apply in this case. Because this is science, and not 
philosophy in the sense which that word still conveys, when 
applied to subjects of this nature. We all know that the 
scientific man is a safe and brilliant practitioner. The most 
unspeculative men of practice have learned to prefer him and 
his arts to the best empiricism. It is the philosophers we 
have had in this field, with their rash anticipations, — with 
their unscientific pre-conceptions, — with a pre- conception, in- 
stead of a fore-knowledge of the power they deal with, com- 



NEW" CONSTRUCTIONS — THE INITIATIVE. 513 

manding results which do not, — there is the point, — which 
do not follow. 

Let no one say that this reformer is one of those who 
expose our miserable condition, without offering to improve 
it; or that he is one of those who take away our gold and 
jewels with their tests, and leave us no equivalent. This is 
no destroyer. He will help us to save all that we have. He 
is guarding us from the error of those who would let it alone 
till the masses have taken the work in hand for themselves, with- 
out science. ' That is the way to lay all fiat/ 

He is not one of those, ' who to make clean, efface, and 
who cure diseases by death.' To found so great a thing as 
the state anew; to dissolve that so old and solid structure, and 
undertake to recompose it as a whole on the spot, is a piece of 
work which this chemist, after a survey of his apparatus, 
declines to take in; though he fairly admits, that if the ques- 
tion were of c a new world,' and not f a world already formed 
to certain customs,' science might have, perhaps, some import- 
ant suggestions to make as to the original structure. And 
yet for all that, it is a scientific practice that is propounded 
here. It is a scientific innovation and renovation, that is 
propounded ; the greatest that was ever propounded, — total, 
absolute, but not sudden. It is a remedy for the world as it 
is, that this reformer is propounding. 

New constructions according to true definitions, scientific 
institutions, — institutions of culture and regimen and cure, 
based on the recognition of the actual human constitution and 
laws, — based on an observation as diligent and subtle, and 
precepts as severe as those which we apply to the culture of 
any other form in nature, — that is the proposition. ' It were a 
strange speech which, spoken or spoken oft, should reclaim a 
man from a vice to which he is by nature subject/ ' Folly is not 
to be cured by bare admonition/ This plan of culture and cure 
involves not the knowledge of that nature which is in all men 
only, but a science, enriched with most careful collections of all 
the specific varieties of that nature. The fullest natural history 
of those forces that are operant in the hourly life of man, the 

L L 



514 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

most profound and subtle observation of the facts of this his- 
tory, the most thoroughly scientific collection of them, make 
the beginning of this enterprise. The propounder of this cure 
will have to begin with the secret disposition of every man 
laid open, and the possibilities of human character exhausted, 
by means of a dissection of the entire form of that human na- 
ture, which every man carries with him, and a solar-miscro- 
6C0pic exhibition of the several dispositions and tempers of 
men, in grand ideal portraits, conspicuous instances of them, 
where the particular disposition and temper is c predominant,' 
as in the characterisation of Hamlet, where it takes all the 
persons of the drama to exhibit characteristics which are more 
or less developed in all men. Those natural peculiarities of 
disposition that work so incessantly and potently in this human 
business, those 'points of nature,' those predetermining forces of 
the human life, must come under observation here, and the 
whole nature of the passions also, and a science of ' the will,' 
very different from that philosophy of it which our metaphy- 
sicians have entertained us with so long. He will have all the 
light of science, all the power of the new method brought to 
bear on this study. And he will have a similar collection, not 
less scientific, of the history of the human fortunes and their 
necessary effects on character; for these are the points that we 
must deal with ' by way of application, and to these all our 
labour is limited and tied; for we cannot fit a garment except 
we take a measure of the form we would fit it to/ Nothing 
short of this can serve as the basis of a scientific system of 
human education. 

But this is not all. It is the human nobility and greatness 
that is the end, and that ' craves,' as the noble who is found 
wanting in it tells us, ' a noble cunning.' It is no single in- 
strumentality that makes the apparatus of this culture and 
cure. Skilful combinations of appliances based on the history 
of those forces which are within our power, which ' we can 
deal with by way of alteration,' forces ' from which the mind 
suffereth,' which have operation on it, so potent that ' they 
can almost change the stamp of nature,' — that they can make 



NEW CONSTRUCTIONS — THE INITIATIVE. 515 

indeed, c another nature/ — these are the engines, — this is the 
machinery which the scientific state will employ for its ends. 
These are the engines, this is the machinery that is going to 
take the place of that apparatus which the state, as it is, finds 
such need of. This is the machinery to ' prevent the fiend,' 
which the scientific statesman is propounding. 

1 1 would we were all of one mind, and. one mind good,' 
says our Poet. ' there were desolation of gallowses and 
gaolers. I speak against my present profit,' [he adds, — he 
was speaking not as a judge or a lawyer, but as a gaoler ,] ' I speak 
against my present profit, but my wish hath a preferment in it.' 

(A. preferment ?) — That is the solution propounded by science, 
of the problem that is pressing on us, and urging on us with 
such violent appeals, its solution. ' I would we were all of one 
mind, and one mind good. My wish hath a preferment in it.' 

1 Folly is not to be cured by bare admonition.' ' It were a 
strange speech which, spoken, or spoken oft, should cure a man 
of a vice to which he is by nature subject,' — subject — by na- 
ture. — That is the Philosopher. ' What he cannot help in his 
nature you account a vice in him,' says the poor citizen, putting 
in a word on the Poefs behalf for Coriolanus whose educa- 
tion, whatever Volumnia may think about it, was not scienti- 
fic, or calculated to reduce that ■ partliness,' that disorganizing 
social principle, whose subsequent demonstrations gave her so 
much offence. Not admonition, not preaching and scolding, 
and not books only, but institutions, laws, customs, habit, edu- 
cation in its more limited sense, 'association, emulation, praise, 
blame,' all the agencies ' from which the mind suffereth/— 
which have power to change it, in skilfully compounded re- 
cipes and regimen scientifically adapted to cases, and 
not prescribed only, but enforced, — these make the state 
machinery — these are the engines that are going to 
* prevent the fiend,' and educate the ' one mind,' — the 
one mind good, which is the sovereign of the common- WEAL, 
— ' my wish hath a preferment in it,' — the one only man who, 
will make when he is crowned, not Eome, but room enough 
for us all, — who will make when he is crowned such desola- 

L L 2 



5 16 THE CURE OP THE COMMON WEAL. 

tion of gallowses and gaolers. These are the remedies for the 
diseases of the state, when the scientific practitioner is 
called in at last, and permitted to undertake his cure. But he 
will not wait for that. He will not wait to be asked. He has 
no delicacy about pushing himself forward in this business. 
The concentration of genius and science on it, henceforth, — 
the gradual adaptation of all these grand remedial agencies to 
this common end, — this end which all truly enlightened 
minds will conspire for, — find to be their own, — this is the 
plan; — this is the sober day-dream of the Elizabethan Re- 
former; this is the plot of the Elizabethan Revolutionist. 
This is the radicalism that he is setting on foot. This is the 
cure of the state which he is undertaking. 

We want to command effects, and the way to do that is to 
find causes; and we must find them according to the new 
method, and not by reasoning it thus and thus, for the result 
is just the same, this philosopher observes, as if we had not 
reasoned it thus and thus, but some other way. That is the 
difficulty with that method, which is in use here at present, 
which this philosopher calls ' common logic' Life goes on, 
life as it is and was, in the face of our reasonings; but it goes 
on in the dark; the phenomena are on the surface in the form 
of effects, and all our weal and woe is in them; but the 
causes are beneath unexplored. They are able to give us 
certain impressions of their natures ; they strike us, and blast 
us, it may be, by way of teaching us something of their 
powers; but we do not know them; they are within our own 
souls and lives, and we do not know them; not because they 
lie without the range of a scientific enquiry, but because we will 
not apply to them the scientific method ; because the old method 
of f preconception' here is still considered the true one. 

The plan of this great scientific enterprise was one which 
embraced, from the first, the whole body of the common-weal. 
It concerned itself immediately and directly with all the parts 
and members of the social state, from the king on his throne 
to the beggar in his straw. Its aim was to disclose ultimately, 
and educate in every member of society that entire and noble 



NEW CONSTRUCTIONS — THE INITIATIVE. 517 

form of human nature which 'each man carries with him/ 
and whereby the individual man is naturally and constitu- 
tionally a member of the common-weal. Its proposition was 
to develop ultimately and educate — successfully edu- 
cate — in each integer of the state, the integral principle — 
the principle whereby in man the true conservation and 
integrity of the part — the virtue, and felicity, and perfection, 
of the part, tend to the weal of the whole — tend to perfect 
and advance the whole. 

' To thine own self be true, 

And it doth follow as the night the day, ;;< 

Thou canst not then be false to any man.' 

' Know thy-SELP. Know thy-self.' 

This enterprise was not the product of a single individual 
mind, and it is important that this fact should be fully 
and unmistakeably enunciated here; because the illustrious 
statesman, and man of letters, who assumed, in his own name 
and person, that part of it which could then be openly 
exhibited, the one on whom the great task of perfecting and 
openly propounding the new method of learning was de- 
volved, is the one whose relation to this enterprise has been 
principally insisted on in this volume. 

The history of this great philanthropic association — an 
association of genius, a combination of chief minds, from 
which the leadership and direction of the modern ages pro- 
ceeds, the history of this ' society," as it was called, when the 
term was still fresh in that special application; at least, when it 
was not yet qualified by its application to those very different 
kinds of voluntary individual combinations — ' bodies of 
neighbourhood' within the larger whole, to which that move- 
ment has given rise; the history of this society, — this first 
' Shake-spear Society' — much as it is to our purpose, and 
much as it is to the particular purpose of this volume, can only 
be incidentally treated here. But as this work was originally 
prepared for publication in the Historical Key to the 
Elizabethan Tradition which formed the first Book of it, 
it was the part of that great Political and Military Chief, and 



5^8 THE CURE OE THE COMMON-WEAL. 

not less illustrious Man of Letters, who was recognised, in his 
own time, as the beginner of this movement and the founder 
of English philosophy, which was chiefly developed. 

And it is the history of that ' great unknown' — that great 
Elizabethan unknown, for whose designs there was needed 
then a veil of a closer texture — of a more cunning pattern 
than any which the exigencies of modern authorship tend 
to fabricate, which must make the key to this tradition; — 
it is the history of that great unknown, whose incog, was a 
closed vizor, — that it was death to open, — a vizor that did 
open once, and — , the sequel is in our history, and will leave 
' a brand ' upon the page which that age makes in it, — ' the age 
that did it, and suffered it, to the end of the world? So says 
the Poet of that age, ('Age, thou are shamed/ ' And peep about 
to find ourselves dishonourable graves'). It is the history of the 
Tacitus who could not wait for a better Caesar. It is the 
history of the man who was sent to the block, they tell us, 
who are able to give us those little secret historic motives that 
do not get woven always into the larger story; it is the 
history of the man who (if his family understood it) was sent 
to the block for the repetition, in his own name, of the words 
— the very words which he had written with his ' goose-pen,' 
as he calls it, years before — which he had written under 
cover of the ' spear' that was ' shaken' in sport, or that shook 
with fear, — under cover of ' the well turned and true filed 
lines in each of which he seems to shake a lance as brandished 
in the eyes of Ignorance? without suspicion — without chal- 
lenge, from the crowned Ignorance, or the Monster that 
crowned it. It is the history of this unknown, obscure, un- 
honoured Father of the Modern Age that unlocks this 
tradition. 

It is the secret friend and 'brother' of the author of the Novum 
Organum, whose history unlocks this tradition. And when shall 
the friendship of such 'a twain' gladden our earth again, and 
build its 'eternal summer } in our common things? When shall a 
'marriage of true minds ' so even be celebrated on the lips and in 
the lives of men again ?' It is the friend and literary partner of 



NEW CONSTRUCTIONS — THE INITIATIVE. 519 

our great recognised philosopher — his partner in his ' private 
and retired arts,' and in his cultivation of f the principal 
and supreme sciences/ in whose history the key to this locked 
up learning is hidden. 

It was an enterprise which originated in the Court of Queen 
Elizabeth, in that little company of wits, and poets, and 
philosophers, which was the first-fruit of the new development 
of the national genius, that followed the revival of the learning 
of antiquity in this island — the fruit which that old stock began 
manifestly to bud and blossom with, about the beginning of 
the latter half of that Queen's reign. For it was the old 
northern genius, under the influence, not of the revival of the 
learning of antiquity only, but of that accumulated influence 
which its previous revival on the Continent brought with it 
here; under the influence, too, of that insular nurture, which 
began so soon to colour and insulate English history; — ' Britain 
is a world by itself,' says Prince Cloten, ' and we will nothing 
pay,' etc. — it was the old northern genius nurtured in the cra- 
dle of that ' bravery' which had written its page of fire in the 
Roman Caesar's story — which had arrested the old classic his- 
torian's pen, and fired it with a poet's prophecy, and taught 
him too how to pronounce from the old British hero's lip the 
burning speech of English freedom ; — it was that which began to 
show itself here, then, in that new tongue, which we call the 
' Elizabethan? It was that which could not fit its words to its 
mouth as it had a mind to do under those conditions, and was 
glad to know that ' the audience was deferred.' That was 
the thing which found itself so much embarrassed by the pre- 
sence of ' a man of prodigious fortune at the table,' who had 
leave ' to change its arguments with a magisterial authority/ 
It was that which was expected to produce its speech to ' serve 

as the base matter to illuminate ' — not the Caesai but the 

Tudor — the Tudor and the Stuart: the last of the Tudors and 
the first of the Stuarts. ' Age, thou art shamed/ It was the 
true indigenous product of the English nationality under that 
great stimulus, which made that age; and the practical deter- 
mination of the English mind, and the spirit of the ancient 



520 THE CUKE OF THE COMMON- WEAL. 

English liberties, the recognition of the common dignity of 
that form of human nature which each man carries entire with 
him — the sentiment of a common human family and brother- 
hood, which this race had brought with it from the forests of 
the North, and which it had conserved through ages of 
oppression, went at once into the new speculation, and deter- 
mined its practical bent, and shaped this enterprise. 

It was an enterprise which included in its plan of operations 
an immediate influence upon the popular mind — the most 
direct, immediate, and radically reforming influences which 
could be brought to bear, under those conditions, upon the 
habits and sentiments of the ignorant, custom-bound masses of 
men ; — those masses which are, in all their ignorance and un- 
fitness for rule, as the philosopher of this age perceived, ' that 
greater part which carries it' — those wretched statesmen, 
under whose rule we are all groaning. 'Questions about 
clothes, and cookery, and law chicanery,' are the questions 
with which the new movement begins to attract attention — a 
universally favourable attention — towards its beneficent pur- 
poses, and to that new command of ' effects ' which arms them. 
But this is only 'to show an abused people that they are not 
wholly forgotten.' To improve the external condition of men, 
to 'accommodate' man to those exterior natural forces, of which 
he had been, till then, the ' slave/ — to minister to the need 
and add to the comforts of the king in his palace, and ' Tom ' 
in his hovel, — this was the first scientific move. This was a 
movement which required no concealment. Its far-reaching 
consequences, its elevating power on the masses, its educational 
power, its revolutionary power, did not lie within the range of 
any observation which the impersonated state was able to bring 
to bear at that time upon the New Organum and its reaches. 

But this was not the only scientifically educational agency 
which this great Educational Association was able to include, 
even then, in its scheme for the culture and instruction of the 
masses — for the culture and instruction of that common social 
unit, which makes the masses and determines political predo- 
minance. Quite the most powerful instrumentality which it 



NEW CONSTRUCTIONS — THE INITIATIVE. 521 

is possible to conceive of, for purposes of direct effect in the 
way of intellectual and moral stimulus, in that stage of a 
popular development, was then already in process of pre- 
paration here ; the ' plant ' of a wondrous and inestimable ma- 
chinery of popular influence stood offering itself, at that 
very moment, to the politicians with whom this movement 
originated, urging itself on their notice, begging to be pur- 
chased, soliciting their monopoly, proposing itself to their 
designs. 

A medium of direct communication between the philosophic 
mind, in its more chosen and noblest field of research, and the 
minds of those to whom the conventional signs of learning are 
not yet intelligible, — one in which the language of action and 
dumb show was, by the condition of the representation, pre- 
dominant, — that language which is, as this philosophy ob- 
served, so much more powerful in its impression than words, 
— not on brutes only, but on those ' whose eyes are more 
learned than their ears, — a medium of communication which 
was one tissue of that ' mute ' language, whereby the direction, 
' how to sustain a tyranny newly usurped,' was conveyed once, 
stood prepared to their hands, waiting the dictation of the 
message of these new Chiefs and Teachers, who had taken 
their cue from Machiavel in exhibiting the arts of govern- 
ment, and who thought it well enough that the people should 
know how to preserve tyrannies newly usurped. 

Those ' amusements,' with which governments that are 
founded and sustained, ' by cutting off and keeping low the 
grandees and nobility ' of a nation, naturally seek to propitiate 
and divert the popular mind, — those amusements which the 
peoples who sustain tyrannies are apt to be fond of— ' he loves 
no plays as thou dost, Antony,' — that ' pulpit,' from which the 
orator of Caesar stole and swayed the hearts of the people 
with his sugared words; and his dumb show of the stabs in 
Caesar's mantle became, in the hands of these new conspirators, 
an engine which those old experimenters lacked, — an engine 
which the lean and wrinkled Cassius, with his much reading 
and ' observation strange ' and dangerous, looking through of 



522 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

the thoughts of men; and the grave, high-toned Brutus, with 
his logic and his stilted oratory, could not, on second thoughts, 
afford to lack. It was this which supplied the means of that 
'volubility of application' which those ' Sir Oracles/ those 
'grave sirs of note,' 'in observing their well-graced forms of 
speech,' it is intimated, ' might easily want.' 

By means of that ' first use of the parable/ whereby (while 
for the present we drop ' the argument ') it serves to illustrate, 
and bring first under the notice of the senses, the abstruser 
truths of a new learning, — truths which are as yet too far out 
of the road of common opinion to be conveyed in other forms, 
— these amusements became, in the hands of the new Teachers 
and Wise Men, with whom the Wisdom of the Moderns had 
its beginning, the means of an insidious, but most ' grave and 
exceedingly useful,' popular instruction. 

But the immediate influence on the common mind was not 
the influence to which this association trusted for the fulfil- 
ment of its great plan of social renovation and advancement. 
That so aspiring social position, and that not less commanding 
position in the world of letters, built up with so much labour, 
with such persistent purpose, with a pertinacity which accepted 
of no defeat, — built up expressly to this end, — that position 
from which a new method of learning could be openly pro- 
pounded, in the face of the schools, in the face of the Univer- 
sities, in the face and eyes of all the Doctors of Learning then, 
was, in itself, no unimportant part of the machinery which 
this political association was compelled to include in the plot 
of its far-reaching enterprise. 

That trumpet-call which rang through Europe, which sum- 
moned the scholasticism and genius of the modern ages, from 
the endless battles of the human dogmas and conceits, into the 
field of true knowledges, — that summons which recalled, and 
disciplined, and gave the word of command to the genius of 
the' modern ages, that was already tumultuously rushing 
thither, — that call which was able to command the modern 
learning, and impose on it, for immediate use, the New Ma- 
chine of Learning, — that Machine which, even in its employ- 



NEW CONSTRUCTIONS — THE INITIATIVE. 523 

raent in the humblest departments of observation, lias already- 
formed, ere we know it, the new mind, which has disciplined 
and trained the modern intelligence, and created insidiously- 
new habits of judgment and belief, — created, too, a new stock 
of truths, which are accepted as a part of the world's creed, 
and from which the whole must needs be evolved in time, — 
this, in itself, was no small step towards securing the great 
ends of this enterprise. It was a step which we are hardly in 
a position, as yet, to estimate. We cannot see what it was till 
the nobler applications of this Method begin to be made. It 
has cost us something while we have waited for these. The 
letter to Sir Henry Savile, on ' the Helps to the Intellectual 
Powers,' which is referred to with so much more iteration and 
emphasis than anything which the surface of the letter exhibits 
would seem to bear, in its brief hints, points also this way, 
though the effect of mental exercises, by means of other in- 
strumentalities, on the habits of a larger class, is also compre- 
hended in it. But the formation of new intellectual habits in 
men liberally educated, appeared to promise, ultimately, those 
larger fruits in the advancement and culture of learning which, 
in ' the hour-glass ' of that first movement, could be, as yet, 
only prophecy and anticipation. The perfection of the Human 
Science, then first propounded, the filling up of ' the Antici- 
pations ' of Learning, which the Philosophy of Science also 
included in its system, — not rash and premature, however, 
and not claiming the place of knowledge, but kept apart in a 
place by themselves, — put down as anticipations, not interpre- 
tations, — the filling up of this outline was what was expected 
as the ultimate result of this proceeding, in the department of 
speculative philosophy. 

But in that great practical enterprise of a social and political 
renovation — that enterprise of 'constructions' according to 
true definitions, which this science fastens its eye on, and 
never ceases to contemplate — it was not the immediate effect 
on the popular mind, neither was it the gradual effect on the 
speculative habits of men of learning and men of intelligence in 
general, that was chiefly relied on. It was the secret tradition, 



524 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

the living tradition of that intention; it was the tradition 
whereby that association undertook to continue itself across 
whatever gulfs and chasms in social history ' the fortunes of 
our state' might make. It was that second use of the fable, 
which is ' to wrap up and conceal'; it was that ' enigmatic' 
method, which reserves the secrets of learning for those ' who 
by the aid of an instructor, or by their own research, are able to 
pierce the veil,' which was relied on for this result. It was the 
power of that tradition, its generative power, its power to repro- 
duce 'in a better hour' the mind and will of that 'company' — 
it was its power to develop and frame that identity which was 
the secret of this association, and its new principle of UNION 

— that identity of the ' one mind, and one mind good,' which 
is the human principle of union — that identity which made a 
common name, a common personality, for those .who worked 
together for that end, and whose will in it was ' one.' A 
name, a personality, a philosophic unity, in whose great radiance 
we have basked so long — a name, a personality whose secret 
lies heavy on all our learning — whose secret of power, whose 
secret of inclusiveness and inexhaustible wealth of knowledge, 
has paralysed all our criticism, 'made marble' — as Milton him- 
self confesses — 'made marble with too much conceiving.' 'Write 
me a prologue, and let the prologue seem to say [in dumb 
action], we will do no harm with our swords.' ' They all 
flourish their swords.' f There is but one mind in all these 
men, and that is bent against Caesar' — Julius Caesar. 

' Even so the race 
Of Shake-spear's mind and manners (?) brightly shines, 
In his well turned and true filed — lines ; 
In each of which he seems to shake a lance, 
As brandished at the eyes of — Ignorance,' 

[We will do no harm with our — WORDS [it seems to say.] 

— Prologue.~\ 

It was the power of the Elizabethan Art of Tradition that 
was relied on here, that 'living Art'; it was its power to repro- 
duce this Institution, through whatever fatal eventualities the 
movement which these men were seeking then to anticipate, 
and organize, and control, might involve; and though the 



NEW CONSTRUCTIONS — THE INITIATIVE. 525 

Parent Union should be overborne in those disastrous, not un- 
foreseen, results — overborne and forgotten — and though other 
means employed for securing that end should fail. 

It is to that posthumous effect that all the hope points here. 
It is the Leonatus Post humus who must fulfil this oracle. 

' Now with the drops of this most balmy time 

My love looks fresh, and death to me subscribes ; 
Since, spite of him, I'll live in this poor rhyme, 

While he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes ; 
And thou in this shall find thy monument, 
When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent.' 

' Not marble, nor the gilded monuments [-Elizabethan Age.] 
Of Princes shall outlive this poiver-ivl rhyme.' 

[This is our unconscious Poet, who does not know that his 
poems are worth printing, or that they are going to get printed 
— who does not know or care whether they are or not.] 

' But you shall shine more bright in these contents, 
Than unswept stone besmear'd with sluttish time. 
When wasteful war shall statues overturn [iconoclasm], 
And broils [civil war] root out the work of masonry, 
Nor Mars his sword, nor war's quick fire shall burn 
The living record of your memory? 

[What is it, then, that this prophet is relying on? Is it a 

manuscript ? Is it the recent invention of goose-quills which he 

is celebrating here with so much lyrical pomp, in, so many, many 

lyrics ? Here, for instance : — ] 

' His beauty shall in these black lines be seen, 
And they shall live, and he in them still green.' 

And here — 

' where, alack ! 
Shall time's best jewel from time's chest lie hid 1 
Or what strong hand caD hold his swift foot back 1 
Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid ? 
O none, unless this miracle [this miracle] have might, 
That in black ink ' 

Is this printer's ink? Or is it the ink of the prompter's 
book? or the fading ink of those loose papers, so soon to be 
' yellowed with age/ scattered about no one knew where, that 
some busy-body, who had nothing else to do, might perhaps 
take it into his head to save? 



526 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

' none, unless this miracle' — THIS MIRACLE, the rejoicing 

scholar and man of letters, who was not for an age, but for all 

time, cries — defying tyranny, laughing at princes' edicts, 

reaching into his own great assured futurity across the gulfs of 

civil war, planting his feet upon that sure ground, and 

singing songs of triumph over the spent tombs of brass and 

tyrants' crests; like that orator who was to make an oration in 

public, and found himself a little straitened in time to fit his 

words to his mouth as he had a mind to do, when Eros, one of 

his slaves, brought him word that the audience was deferred 

till the next day; at which he was so ravished with joy, that he 

enfranchised him. * This miracle* He knows what miracles 

are, for he has told us; but none other knew what miracle 

this was that he is celebrating here with all this wealth of 

symphonies. 

' none, unless this miracle have might, 
That in black ink my love may still shine bright? 

[' My love/ — wait till you know what it is, and do not 
think to know with the first or second reading of poems, that 
are on the surface of them scholastic, academic, mystical, ob- 
trusively enigmatical. Perhaps, after all, it is that Eros who 
was enfranchised, emancipated.] 

' But thy eternal summer shall not fade, 
Nor lose possession of that /air thou owest [thou owest], 
Nor shall death brag thou wanderest in his shade, 
When in eternal lines to time thou growest. 
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, 
So long lives this, and this gives life to — thee? 

But here is our prophecy, which we have undertaken to 
read with the aid of this collation : — 

' When wasteful war shall statues overturn, 
And broils root out the work of masonry ; 
Nor Mars his sword, nor war's quick fire shall burn 
The living record of your memory. 
'Gainst death, and all oblivious enmity, 
Shall you pace forth. Your praise shall still find room, 
Even in the eyes [collateral sounds] of all posterity, 
That wear this world out to the ending doom. 
So, till the judgment that yourself arise [till then], 
You live in this, and dwell in lovers' 1 eyes.' 



NEW CONSTRUCTIONS — THE INITIATIVE. 527 

See the passages at the commencement of this chapter, if 
there be any doubt as to this reading. 

' In lover's eyes? 
Leonatus Posthumus. Shall 's have a Play of this ? Thou scornful Page, 
There he thy part. [To Imogen disguised as Pidele.] 

The consideration which qualified, in the mind of the 
Author of the Advancement of Learning, the great difficulty 
which the question of civil government presented at that 
time, is the key to this ' plot.' For men, and not ' Romans' 
only, ' are like sheep / and if you can but get some few to go 
right, the rest will follow. That was the plan. To create a 
better leadership of men, — to form a new order and union of 
men, — a new nobility of men, acquainted with the doctrine 
of their own nature, and in league for its advancement, to 
seize the ' thoughts ' of those whose law is the law of the 
larger activity, and ' inform them with nobleness/ — was the 
plan. 

For these the inner school was opened ; for these its ascend- 
ing platforms were erected. For these that ' closet ' and 
' cabinet/ where the ' simples ' of the Shake-spear philosophy 
are all locked and labelled, was built. For these that secret 
' cabinet of the Muses,' where the Delphic motto is cut anew, 
throws out its secret lures, — its gay, many-coloured, deceiving 
lures, — its secret labyrinthine clues, — for all lines in this 
building meet in that centre. All clues here unwind to that. 
For these — for the minds on whom the continuation of this 
enterprize was by will devolved, the key to that cabinet — 
the historical key to its inmost compartment of philosophic 
mysteries, was carefully laboured and left, — pointed to — 
pointed to with immortal gesticulations, and left (' What I 
cannot speak, I point out with my finger ') ; the key to 
that ' Verulamian cabinet/ which we shall hear of when 
the fictitious correspondence in which the more secret his- 
tory of this time was written, comes to be opened. That 
cabinet where the subtle argument that was inserted in the 
Poem or the Play, but buried there in its gorgeous drapery, is 
laid bare in prose as subtle (' I here scatter it up and down 



528 THE CUKE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

indifferently for verse'); where the new truth that was spoken 
in jest, as well as in parables, to those who were without, is 
unfolded, — that truth which moved unseen amid the gambols 
of the masque, — preferring to raise questions rather than 
objections, — which stalked in, without suspicion, in • the 
hobby-horse ' of the clown, — which the laugh of the ground- 
lings was so often in requisition to cover, — that ' to beguile the 
time looked like the time,' — that ' looked like the flower, and 
was the serpent under it.' 

For these that secret place of confidential communication 
was provided, where 'the argument' of all these Plays is 
opened without respect to the ' offence in it/ — to its utmost 
reach of abstruseness and subtilty — in its utmost reach of 
departure from ' the road of common opinion/ — where the 
Elizabethan secrets of Morality, and Policy and Religion, 
which made the Parables of the New Doctrine, are unrolled, 
at last, in all the new, artistic glories of that ' wrapped up' 
intention. This is the second use of the Fable in which we 
resume that dropped argument, — dropped for that time, 
while Caesar still commanded his thirty legions; and when 
the question, ' How long to philosophise?' being started in the 
schools again, the answer returned still was, ' Until our armies 
cease to be commanded by fools.' This is that second use of 
the Fable where we find the moral of it at last, — that moral 
which our moralists have missed in it, — that moral which 
is not ' vulgar and common-place/ but abstruse, and out of the 
road of common opinion, — that moral in which the Moral 
Science, which is the Wisdom of the Moderns, lurks. 

It is to these that the Wise Man of our ages speaks (for 
we have him, — we do not wait for him), in the act of dis- 
playing a little, and folding up for the future, his plan of 
a Scientific Human Culture; it is to these that he speaks when 
he says, with a little of that obscurity which ' he mortally 
hates, and would avoid if he could': 'As Philocrates sported 
with Demosthenes/ you may not marvel, Athenians, that 
Demosthenes and I do differ, for he drinketh water, and I 
drink wine; and like as we read of an ancient parable of the 



NEW CONSTRUCTIONS — THE INITIATIVE. 529 

two gates of sleep ... so if we put on sobriety and attention, 
we shall find it a sure maxim in knowledge, that the pleasant 
liquor of wine is the more vaporous, and the braver gate of 
ivory sendeth forth the falser dreams/* 

And in his general proposal to lay open ' those parts of 
learning which lie fresh and waste, and not improved and 
converted by the industry of man, to the end that such a 
plot, made and committed to memory, may both minister 
light to any public designation, and also serve to excite 
voluntary endeavours,' he says, ' I do foresee that of those 
things which I shall enter and register as deficiencies and 
omissions, many will conceive and censure that some of them 
are already done, and extant, others to be but curiosities and 
things of no great use [such as the question of style, for 
instance, and those ' particular ' arts of tradition to which this 
remark is afterwards applied] — and others to be of too great 
difficulty — and almost impossibility — to be compassed and 
effected; but for the two first, I refer myself to particulars; 
for the last, — touching impossibility, — I take it those things 
are to be held possible, which may be done by some person, 
though not by every one; and which may be done by many, 
though not by any one; and which may be done in succession 
of ages, though not within the hour-glass of one man's life; 
and which may be done by public designation, though not by 
private endeavour. 

That was ' the plot ' — that was the plan of the Elizabethan 
Innovation. 

The Enigma op Leonatus Posthumus. 
' When as a lion's whelp shall, to himself unknown, without 
seeking find, and be embraced by a piece of tender air ; and 
when from a stately cedar shall be lopped branches, which, 
being dead many years, shall after revive, be jointed to the 
old stock, and freshly grow ; then shall Posthumus end his 
miseries, Britain be fortunate, and flourish in peace and 
plenty.' 

* 'J,' says 'Michael,' who is also in favour of 'sobriety,' arjd critical 
upon excesses of all kinds, ' I have ever observed, that swper-celestial 
theories and suS-terranean manners are in singular accordance.' 

M M 



530 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 



The Verulamian Cabinet, and its Workmanship. 

Here, for instance, is a specimen of the manner in which 
scholars who write about these times, allude to the reserved 
parts of this philosophy, and to those ' richer and bolder 
meanings/ which could not then be inserted in the acknow- 
ledged writings of so great a person. This is a specimen of 
the manner in which a posthumous collection and reintegration 
of this philosophy, and a posthumous emancipation of it, is 
referred to, by scholars who write from the Continent some- 
where about these days. Whether the date of the writing be 
a little earlier or a little later, — some fifty years or so, — it 
does not seem to make much difference as to the general intent 
and purport of it. 

Here is a scholar, for instance, whose main idea of life on this 
planet it appears to be, to collect the philosophy, and protect 
the posthumous fame of the Lord Bacon. For this purpose, 
he has established a literary intimacy, quite the most remark- 
able one on record — at least, between scholars of different 
and remote nationalities — between himself and two English 
gentlemen, a Mr. Smith, and the Rev. Dr. Rawley. He writes 
from the Hague but he appears to have acquired in some way 
a most extraordinary insight into this business. 

1 Though I thought that I had already sufficiently showed 
what veneration I had for the illustrious Lord Verulam, yet I 
shall take such care for the future, that it may not possibly be 
denied, that I endeavoured most zealously to make this thing 
known to the learned world. But neither shall this design, of 
setting forth in one volume all the Lord Bacon's works, proceed 
without consulting you [This letter is addressed to the Rev. 
Dr. Rawley, and is dated a number of years after Lord Bacon's 
death] — without consulting you, and without inviting you to 
cast in your symbol, worthy such an excellent edition : that so the 
appetite of the reader [It was a time when symbols of various 
kinds — large and small — were much in use in the learned 
world] — that so the appetite of the reader, provoked already 



NEW CONSTRUCTIONS — THE INITIATIVE. 53 1 

by his published works, may be further gratified by the pure 
novelty of so considerable an appendage. 

1 For the French interpreter, who patched together his 
things I know not whence, and tacked that motley piece to 
him ; they shall not have place in this great collection. But 
yet I hope to obtain your leave to publish a-part, as an appendix 
to the Natural History, — that exotic work, — gathered together 
from this and the other place {of his lordship's writings), [that 
is the true account of it] and by me translated into — Latin. 

For seeing the genuine pieces of the Lord Bacon are 
already extant, and in many hands, it is necessary that the 
foreign reader be given to understand of what threads the 
texture of that book consists, and how much of truth there is 
in that which that shameless person does, in his preface to the 
reader, so stupidly write of you. 

' My brother, of blessed memory, turned his words into 
Latin, in the First Edition of the Natural History, having 
some suspicion of the fidelity of an unknown author. I will, 
in the Second Edition, repeat them, and with just severity 
animadvert upon them : that they, into whose hands that work 
comes, may know it to be supposititious, or rather patched up 
of many distinct pieces; how much soever the author bears 
himself upon the specious title of Verulam. Unless, perhaps, 
I should particularly suggest in your name, that these words 
were there inserted, by way of caution; and lest malignity and 
rashness should any way blemish the fame of so eminent a 
person. 

' If my fate would permit me to live according to my wishes, 
I would fly over into England, that I might behold whatsoever 
remaineth in your Cabinet of the Verulamian workmanship, and 
at least make my eyes witnesses of it, if the possession of the 
merchandise be yet denied to the public. At present I will 
support the wishes of my impatient desire, with hope of seeing, 
one day, those (issues) which being committed to faithful privacy, 
wait the time till they may safely see the light, and not be 
stifled in their birth. 

' 1 wish, in the mean time, I could have a sight of the copy of 

m m 2 



532 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

the Epistle to Sir Henry Savil, concerning the Helps of the 
Intellectual Powers: for I am persuaded, as to the other Latin 
remains, that I shall not obtain, for present use, the removal of 
them from the place in which they now are.' 

Extract of a letter from Mr. Isaac Gruter. Here is the 
beginning of it: — 

' To the Rev. ¥m, Rawley, D.D. 

Isaac Gruter wisheth much health. 

1 Reverend Sir, — It is not just to complain of the slowness 
of your answer, seeing that the difficulty of the passage, in the 
season in which you wrote, ivhich was towards winter, might easily 
cause it to come no faster ; seeing likewise there is so much 
to be found in it which may gratify desire, and perhaps so 
much the more, the longer it was ere it came to my hands. 
And although I had little to send back, besides my thanks for 
the little Index, yet that seemed to me of such moment that I 
would no longer suppress them : especially because I accounted 
it a crime to have suffered Mr. Smith to have been without an 
answer : Mr. Smith, my most kind friend, and to whose care, in 
my matters, I owe all regard and affection, yet without diminu- 
tion of that (part and that no small one neither) in which 
Dr. Rawley hath place. So that the souls of us three, so 
throughly agreeing, may be aptly said to have united in a 
triga. 3 

It is not necessary, of course, to deny the historical claims 
of the Rev. Dr. Rawley, who is sufficiently authenticated ; or 
even of Mr. Smith himself, who would no doubt be able to 
substantiate himself, in case a particular inquiry were made 
for him; and it would involve a serious departure from the 
method of invention usually employed in this association, 
which did not deal with shadows when cotemporary instru- 
mentalities were in requisition, if the solidarity of Mr. Isaac 
Gruter himself should admit of a moment's question. The pre- 
cautions of this secret, but so powerful league, — the skill with 
which its instrumentalities were selected and adapted to its 



NEW CONSTRUCTIONS — THE INITIATIVE. 533 

ends, is characterised by that same matchless dramatic power, 
which betrays ' the source from which it springs ' even when 
it ' only plays at working.' 

But if any one is anxious to know who the third person of 
this triga really was, or is, a glance at the Directory would 
enable such a one to arrive at a truer conclusion than the 
first reading of this letter would naturally suggest. For this 
is none other than the person whom the principle of this triga, 
and its enlightened sentiment and bond of union, already 
symbolically comprehended, whom it was intended to compre- 
hend ultimately in all the multiplicity and variety of his 
historical manifestations, though it involved a deliberate plan 
for reducing and suppressing his many-headedness, and re- 
storing him to the use of his one only mind. For though the 
name of this person is often spelt in three letters, and oftener 
in one, it takes all the names in the Directory to spell it in 
full. For this is none other than the person that ' MichaeV 
refers to so often and with so much emphasis, glancing always 
at his own private name, and the singular largeness and com- 
prehensiveness of his particular and private constitution. C A11 
the world knows me in my book, and my book in me.' ' 7, 
the first of any, by my universal being. Every man carries 
with him the entire form of human condition.' 

But the name of Mr. Isaac Gruter was not less compre- 
hensive, and could be made to represent the whole triga in an 
emergency, as well as another ; [' I take so great pleasure in 
being judged and known that it is almost indifferent to me in 
which of the two forms I am so'] though that does not hinder 
him from inviting Dr. Eawley to cast in his symbol, which 
was ' so considerable an appendage.'' For though the very 
smallest circle sometimes represents it, it was none other than 
the symbol that gave name to the theatre in which the illus- 
trated works of this school were first exhibited; the theatre 
which hung out for its sign on the outer wall, ' Hercules and 
his load too.' At a time when ' conceits' and ' devices in 
letters,' when anagrams and monograms, and charades, and all 
kinds of ' racking of orthography ' were so much in use, not as 



534 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

curiosities merely, but to avoid another kind of ' racking,' a 
cipher referred to in this philosophy as the ' wheel cipher/ 
which required the letters of the alphabet to be written in a 
circle to serve as a key to the reading, supplies a clue to some 
of these symbols. The first three letters of the alphabet repre- 
senting the whole in the circle, formed a character or symbol 
which was often made to stand as a 'token' for a proper name, 
easily spelt in that way, when phonography and anagrams were 
in such lively and constant use, — while it made, at the same 
time, a symbolical representation of the radical doctrine of 
the new school in philosophy, — a school then so new, that its 
'Doctors' were compelled to 'pray in the aid of simile,' even in 
affixing their names to their own works, in some cases. And that 
same letter which was capable of representing in this secret lan- 
guage either the microcosm, or ' the larger whole,' as the case 
required (either with, or without the eye or 1 in it, sending 
rays to the circumference) sufficed also to spell the name of 
the Grand Master of this lodge, — ' who also was a man, take 
him for all in all,' — the man who took two hemispheres for 
' his symbol. 1 That was the so considerable appendage which 
his friend alludes to, — though ' the natural gaiety of dispo- 
sition,' of which we have so much experience in other places, 
and which the gravity of these pursuits happily does not 
cloud, suggests a glance in passing at another signification, 
which we find alluded to also in another place in Mrs. 
Quickly's ' Latin.' Mere frivolities as these conceits and private 
and retired arts seem now, the Author of the Advancement of 
Learning tells us, that to those who have spent their labours 
and studies in them, they seem great matters, referring par- 
ticularly to that cipher in which it is possible to write omnia 
per omnia, and stopping to fasten the key of it to his ' index ' 
of ' the principal and supreme sciences,' — those sciences 
' which being committed to faithful privacy, wait the time 
when they may safely see the light, and not be stifled in 
their birth.' 

New constructions, according to true definitions, was the 
plan, — this triga was the initiative. 



THE WRESTLING INSTANCE. 535 



CHAPTER XII. 

THE IGNORANT ELECTION REVOKED. — A WRESTLING 

INSTANCE. 

' For as they were men of the best composition in the state of Rome, 
which, either being consuls, inclined to the people' [' If he would but 
incline to the people, there never was a worthier man'], 'or being tri- 
bunes, inclined to the senate, so, in the matter which we handle now 
[doctrine of Cure'], they be the best physicians which, being learned, 
incline to the traditions of experience; or, being empirics, incline to 
the methods of learning.' Advancement of Learning. 

"OUT while the Man of Science was yet planning these vast 
scientific changes — vast, but noiseless and beautiful as 
the movements of God in nature — there was another kind of 
revolution brewing. All that time there was a cloud on his poli- 
tical horizon — ' a huge one, a black one' — slowly and steadfastly 
accumulating, and rolling up from it, which he had always an 
eye on. He knew there was that in it which no scientific ap- 
paratus that could be put in operation then, on so short a 
notice, and when science was so feebly aided, would be able 
to divert or conduct entirely. He knew that so fearful a war- 
cloud would have to burst, and get overblown, before any 
chance for those peace operations, those operations of a solid 
and lasting peace, which he was bent on, could be had — 
before any space on the earth could be found broad enough for 
his Novum Organum to get to work on, before the central levers 
of it could begin to stir. 

That revolution which ' was singing in the wind' then to 
his ear, was one which would have to come first in the chrono- 
logical order; but it was easy enough to see that it was not 
going to be such a one, in all respects, as a man of his turn 
of genius would care to be out in with his works. 

He knew well enough what there was in it. He had not 



536 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

been so long in such sharp daily collision with the elements of 
it — he had not been so long trying conclusions with them 
under such delicate conditions, conditions requiring so nice an 
observation — without arriving at some degree of assurance in 
regard to their main properties, without attaining, indeed, to 
what he calls knowledge on that subject — knowledge as dis- 
tinguished from opinion — so as to be able to predict ' with a 
near aim' the results of the possible combinations. The con- 
clusion of this observation was, that the revolutionary move- 
ments then at hand were not, on the whole, likely to be 
conducted throughout on rigidly scientific principles. 

The spectacle of a people violently ' revoking their ignorant 
election? and empirically seeking to better their state under 
such leaders as such a movement was likely to throw up, and 
that, too, when the old military government was still so strong 
in moral forces, so sure of a faction in the state — of a faction 
of the best, which would cleave the state to the centre, which 
would resist with the zealot's fire unto blood and desperation 
the unholy innovation — that would stand on the last plank of 
the wrecked order, and wade through seas of slaughter to 
restore it; the prospect of untried political innovation, under 
such circumstances, did not present itself to this Poet's imagi- 
nation in a form so absolutely alluring, as it might have done 
to a philosopher of a less rigidly inductive, turn of mind. 

His canvass, with its magic draught of the coming event, 
includes already some contingencies which the programme of 
the theoretical speculator in revolutions would have been 
far enough from including then, when such movements were 
yet untried in modern history, and the philosopher had to 
go back to mythical Rome to borrow an historical frame of 
one that would contain his piece. The conviction that the 
crash was, perhaps, inevitable, that the overthrow of the 
existing usurpation, and the restoration of the English subject 
to his rights, — a movement then already determined on, — 
would perhaps involve these so tragic consequences — the con- 
viction that the revolution was at hand, was the conviction 
with which he made his arrangements for the future. 



THE WRESTLING INSTANCE. 537 

But if any one would like to see now for himself what 
vigorous grasp of particulars this inductive science of state 
involves, what a clear, comprehensive, and masterly basis of 
history it rests on, and how totally unlike the philosophy of 
prenotions it is in this respect — if one would see what breadth 
of revolutionary surges this Artist of the peace principles was 
able to span with his arches and sleepers, what upheavings 
from the then unsounded depths of political contingencies, 
what upliftings from the last depths of the revolutionary 
abysses, this science of stability, this science of the future 
state, is settled on, — such a one must explore this work 
yet further, and be able to find and unroll in it that revolu- 
tionary picture which it contains — that scientific exhibition 
which the Elizabethan statesman has contrived to fold in it 
of a state in which the elements are already cleaving and 
separating, one in which the historical solidities are already 
in solution, or struggling towards it — prematurely, perhaps, 
and in danger of being surprised and overtaken by new com- 
binations, not less oppressive and unscientific than the old. 

' Unless philosophy can make a Juliet, 
Displant a town, reverse a prince's doom, 
Hang up philosophy' — 

wrote this Poet's fire of old. 

' Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased V 

it writes again. No? 

' Throw physic to the dogs, I '11 none of it.' 

' See now what learning is,' says the practical-minded nurse, 
quite dazzled and overawed with that exhibition of it which 
has just been brought within her reach, and expressing, in the 
readiest and largest terms which her vocabulary supplies to 
her, her admiration of the practical bent of Friar Laurence's 
genius; who seems to be doing his best to illustrate the idea 
which another student, who was not a Friar exactly, was un- 
dertaking to demonstrate from his cell about that time — the 
idea of the possibility of converging a large and studious ob- 
servation of nature in general, — and it is a very large 



538 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

and curious one which this Friar betrays, — upon any of 
those ordinary questions, of domestic life, which are constantly 
recurring for private solution. And though this knowledge 
might seem to be f so variable as it falleth not under precept, 1 
the prose philosopher is of the opinion that c a universal insight, 
and a wisdom of council and advice, gathered by general 
observation of cases of like nature ,' is available for the par- 
ticular instances which occur in this department. And the 
philosophic poet appears to be of his opinion; for there is 
no end to the precepts which he inducts from this ' variable 
knowledge' when he gets it on his table of review, in the 
form of natural history, in ' prerogative cases and e illus- 
trious instances/ cases cleared from their accidental and 
extraneous adjuncts — ideal cases. And though this poor 
Friar does not appear to have been very successful in this par- 
ticular instance; if we take into account the fact that 'the 
Tragedy was the thing,' and that nothing but a tragedy would 
serve his purpose, and that all his learning was converged on 
that effect ; if we take into account the fact that this is a 
scientific experiment, and that the characters are sacrificed for 
the sake of the useful conclusions, the success will not perhaps 
appear so questionable as to throw any discredit upon this 
new theory of the applicability of learning to questions of this 
nature. 

' Unless philosophy can make a Juliet.' But this is the 
philosophy that did that very thing, and the one that made a 
Hamlet also, besides f reversing a prince's doom'; for this is the 
one that takes into account those very things in heaven and 
earth which Horatio had omitted in his abstractions; and this 
is the philosopher who speaks from his philosophic chair of 
1 men of good composition,' and who gives a recipe for com- 
posing them. ' Unless philosophy can make a Juliet,' is 
Romeo's word. ' See now what learning is,' is the Nurse's 
commentary; for that same Friar, demure as he looks now 
under his hood, talking of ' simples ' and great nature's latent 
virtues, is the one that will cog the nurse's hearts from 
them, and come back beloved of all the trades in Rome. With 



THE WRESTLING INSTANCE. 539 

his new art of ' composition' he will compose, not Juliets nor 
Hamlets only; mastering the radicals, he will compose, he will 
dissolve and recompose ultimately the greater congregation ; for 
the powers in nature are always one, and they are not many. 

Let us see now, then, what it is, — this ' universal insight in 
the affairs of the world,' this ' wisdom of counsel and advice, 
gathered from cases of a like nature,' with an observation that 
includes all natures, — let us see what this new wisdom of 
counsel is, when it comes to be applied to this huge growth of 
the state, this creature of the ages ; and in its great crisis of 
disorder — shaken, convulsed — wrapped in elemental horror, 
and threatening to dissolve into its primal warring atoms. 

'Doctor, the Thanes fly from me.' 

' If thou couldst, Doctor, cast 
The water of my LAXT>,find her disease, 
And purge it to a sound and pristine health, 
I would applaud thee to the very echo, 
That should applaud again' 

'What rhubarb, senna, or what purgative drug, 
Would scour these English hence 1 Hear'st thou of them 1 ' 

c Cousins, I hope the days are near at hand 
That chambers will be safe.' 

Let us see, then, what it is that this man will have, who 
criticises so severely the learning of other men, — who disposes 
so scornfully, right and left, of the physic and metaphysic of 
the schools as he finds them, — who daffs the learning of the 
world aside, and bids it pass. Let us see wdiat the learning is 
that is not ' words,' as Hamlet says, complaining of the reading 
in his book. 

This part has been taken out from its dramatic connections, 
and reserved for a separate exhibition, on account of a certain 
new and peculiar value it has acquired since it was produced 
in those connections. Time has changed it ' into something 
rich and strange,' — Time has framed it, and poured her illus- 
tration on it: it is history now. That flaming portent, this 
aurora that fills the seer's heaven, these fierce angry warriors, 



540 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

that are fighting here upon the clouds, ' in ranks, and squad- 
rons, and right forms of war/ are but the marvels of that 
science that lays the future open. 

' There is a history in all men's lives, 
Figuring the nature of the times deceased ; 
The which observed, a man may prophesy, 
With a near aim, of the main chance of things 
As yet not come to life, which, in their seeds 
And weak beginnings, lie intreasured. 
Such things become the hatch and brood of time.' 

' One need not go to heaven to predict imminent changes 
and revolutions/ says that other philosopher, who scribbles on 
this same subject about these days in such an entertaining 
manner, and who brings so many ' buckets ' from ' the head- 
spring of sciences,' to water his plants in this' field in par- 
ticular. ' That which most threatens us is a divulsion of the 
whole mass.' 

This part is produced here, then, as a specimen of that kind 
of prophecy which one does not need to go to heaven for. 
And the careful reader will observe, that notwithstanding the 
distinct disavowal of any supernatural gift on the part of this 
seer, and this frank explanation of the mystery of his Art, the 
prophecy appears to compare not unfavourably with others 
which seem to come to us with higher claims. A very useful 
and very remarkable kind of prophecy indeed, this inductive 
prophecy appears to be; and the question arises, whether a 
kind, endowed of God with a faculty of seeing, which com- 
mands the future in so inclusive a manner, and with so near 
and sufficient an aim for the most important practical purposes, 
ought to be besieging Heaven for a swjomiatural gift, and 
questioning the ancient seers for some vague shadows of the 
coming event, instead of putting this immediate endowment 
— this ' godlike' endowment — under culture. 

There is another reason for reserving this part. In the heat 
and turmoil of this great ACT, the Muse of the Inductive 
Science drops her mask, and she forgets to take it up again. 
The hand that is put forth to draw ' the next ages ' into the 



THE WRESTLING INSTANCE. 54-1 

scene, when the necessary question of the play requires it, is 
bare. It is the Man of Learning here everywhere, without 
any disguise, — the man of the new learning, openly applying 
his ' universal insight,' and e wisdom of counsel and advice, 
gathered by general observation of cases of like nature,' to 
this great question of c Policy,' which was then hurrying 
on, with such portentous movement, to its inevitable practical 
solution. 

He who would see at last for himself, then, the trick of this 
• Magician/ when he ' brings the rabble to his place,' the reader 
who would know at last why it is that these old Eoman graves 
' have waked their sleepers, oped, and let them forth, by his so 
potent art ' ; and why it is, that at this great crisis in English 
history, the noise of the old Eoman battle hurtles so fiercely 
in the English ear, should read now — but read as a work of 
natural science in politics, from the scientific statesman's hands, 
deserves to be read — this great revolutionary scene, which 
the Poet, for reasons of his own, has buried in the heart of 
this Play, which he has subordinated with his own matchless 
skill to the general intention of it, but which we, for the sake 
of pursuing that general intention with the less interruption, 
now that the storm appears to be ' overblown,' may safely reserve 
for the conclusion of our reading of this scientific history, and 
criticism, and rejection of the Military Usurpation of the 
Common-weal. 

The reading of it is very simple. One has only to observe 
that the Poet avails himself of the dialogue here, with even 
more than his usual freedom, for the purpose of disposing of 
the bolder passages, in the least objectionable manner, — inter- 
rupting the statement in critical points, and emphasizing it, by 
that interruption, to the careful reader ' of the argument/ but 
to the spectator, or to one who takes it as a dialogue merely, 
neutralizing it by that dramatic opposition. For the political 
criticism, which is of the boldest, passes safely enough, by 
being merely broken, and put into the mouths of opposing 
factions, who are just upon the point of coming to blows upon 
the stage, and cannot, therefore, be suspected of collusion. 



542 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

For the popular magistracy, as it represents the ignorance, and 
stupidity, and capricious tyranny of the multitude, and their 
unfitness for rule, is subjected to the criticism of the true con- 
sulship, on the one hand, while the military usurpation of the 
chair of state, and the law of Conquest, is not less severely 
criticized by the true Tribune — the Tribune, whose Tribe is 
the Kind — on the other ; and it was not necessary to produce, 
in any more prominent manner, just then, the fact, that both 
these offices and relations were combined in that tottering 
estate of the realm, — that ' old riotous form of military 
government,' which held then only by the virtual election of 
the stupidity and ignorance of the people, and which, this 
Poet and his friends were about to put on its trial, for its innova- 
tions in the government, and suppressions of the ancient estates 
of this realm, — for its suppression of the dignities and privileges 
of the Nobility, and its suppression of the chartered dignities 
and rights of the Commons. 

Scene. — A Street. Cornets. Enter Coriolanus with, his two military 
friends, who have shared with him the conduct of the Volscian wars, 
and have but just returned from their campaign, Cominius and Ti- 
tus Lartius, — and with them the old civilian Menenius, who, patri- 
cian as he is, on account of his honesty, — a truly patrician virtue, — is 
in favour with the people. 'He's an honest one. Would they 
were all so. 7 

The military element predominates in this group of citi- 
zens, and of course, they are talking of the wars, — the foreign 
wars: but the principle of inroad and aggression on the one 
hand, and defence on the other, the arts of subjugation, and re- 
conciliation, the arts of WAR and government in their most 
general forms are always cleared and identified, and tracked, 
under the specifications of the scene. 

Cor. Tullus Aufidius then had made new head. 
Lart. He had, my lord, and that it was, which caused 

Our swifter composition. 
Cor. So then, the Volsces stand but as at first, 

Ready, when time shall prompt them, to make road 

Upon us again. 



THE WRESTLING INSTANCE. 543 

Com. They [Volsces X] are worn, lord consul, so 

That we shall hardly in our ages see 
Their banners wave again. 
* * * * 

[Enter Sicinius and Brutus!] 
Cor. Behold ! these are the tribunes of the people, 

The tongues o' the common mouth. I do despise them ; 
For they do prank them in authority, 
Against all noble sufferance. 
Sic. Pass no further. 

Cor. Ha ! what is that 1 
Bru. It will be dangerous to 

Go on : No further. 
Cor. "What makes this change 1 

Men. The matter 1 

Com. Hath he not passed the nobles and the commons 1 
Bru. Cominius. — No. 

Cor. Have 1 had children's voices 1 [Yes.] 

Sen. Tribunes, give way : — he shall to the market-place. 
Bru. The people are incensed against him. 
Sic. Stop. 

Or all will fall in broil. 
Cor. Are these your herd 1 

Must these have voices that can yield them now, [offices 1 
And straight disclaim their tongues 1 What are tour 
You, being their mouths, why rule you not their teeth? 
Have you not set them on ? 
Men. Be calm, be calm. 

Cor. It is a purposed thing, and grows by plot, 
To curb the will of the nobility : — 
Sufer it, and live with such as cannot rule, 
Nor ever will be ruled. 
Bru. Call't not a plot : 

The people cry you mocked them ; and of late, 
When com was given them gratis, you repined ; 
Scandaled the suppliants for the people ; called them 
Time-pleasers, flatterers, foes to nobleness. 
Cor. Why, this was known before. 
Bru. Not to them all. 

Cor. Have you informed them since ? 
Bru. How ! / inform them 1 

Cor. You are like to do such business. 
Bru. Not unlike, 

Each way to better yours. 
Cor. Why then should / be consul 1 By yon clouds, 



544 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

Let me deserve so ill as you, and make me 
Your fellow tribune. 

Sic. You show too much of that, 

For which the people stir : If you will pass 
To where you are bound, you must inquire your way, — 
Which you are out of, — with a gentler spirit ; 
Or never be so noble as a consul, 
Nor yoke with him for tribune. 

Men. Let's be calm. 

Com. The people are abused ; — set on — this paltering 
Becomes not Rome : nor has Coriolanus 
Desexwed this so dishonoured rub, laid falsely 
I' the plain way of his merit. 

Cor. Tell me of corn : 

This was my speech, and I will speak't again. 

Men. Not noio, not now. 
First Sen. Not in this heat, sir, now. 

Cor. Now, as I live, I will. — My nobler friends 
I crave their pardons : — 
For the mutable, rank scented many, let them 
Regard me, as I do not flatter, and 
Therein behold themselves : I say again, 
In soothing them, we nourish 'gainst our senate, 
The cockle of rebellion, insolence, sedition, 
Which we ourselves have ploughed for, sowed and scattered, 
By mingling them with us, the honoured number. 
Who lack not virtue, no, — nor power, but that 
Which they have given to — beggars. 

Men. Well, no more. 

First Sen. No more words, we beseech you. 

Cor. How, no more : 

As for my country, I have shed my blood. 
Not fearing outward force, so shall my lungs 
Coin words till their decay against those meazels 
Which we disdain, should tetter us, yet sought 
The very way to catch them. 

Bru. You speak o' the people, 

As if you were a god to punish, not 
A man of their infirmity. 

Sic, 'T were well 

We let the people know't. 

Men. What, what ? his choler. 

Cor. Choler ! 

Were I as patient as the midnight sleep, 
By Jove, 't would be my mind. 

Sic. It is a mind, 



THE WRESTLING INSTANCE. 545 

That shall remain a poison where it is, 

Not p oison any further. 
Cor. Shall remain ! 

Hear you this Triton of the minnows 1 mark you 

His absolute shall 1 
Com. ' Ttoas from the canon, 

SHALL ! 

good, but most unwise patricians, why 

You grave, but reckless senators, have you thus 

Given Hydra here to choose an officer, 

That with his peremptory shall — being but 

The horn and noise d the monster — wants not spirit 

To say, he '11 turn your current in a ditch, 

And make your channel his ? If he have power, 

Then veil your ignorance : — [that let him have it.] 

— if none, awake 
Your dangerous lenity. 

[Mark it well, for it is not, as one may see who looks at it 
but a little, it is not the lost Roman weal and its danger that 
fires the passion of this speech. ' Look at this player whether 
he has not turned his colour, and has tears in his eyes.' ' What's 
Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba, that he should weep for her ? 
What would he do, had he the motive and the cue for passion 

that / have.'] 

— if none, awake 
Your dangerous lenity. If you are learned, 
Be not as common fools ; if you are not — 

What do you draw this foolish line for, that separates you 
from the commons? If you are not, there's no nobility. If 
you are not, what business have you in these chairs of 

state ? 

— if you are not, 

Let them have cushions by you. You are plebeians, 
If they be senators ; and they are no less, 
When both your voices blended, the greatest taste 
Most palates theirs. They choose their magistrate ; 
And such a one as he, who puts his shall, — 

[Mark it, his popular shall] . 

His popular shall, against a graver bench 
Than ever frown'd in Greece ! By Jove himself, 
It makes the consuls base : and my soul aches, 

N N 



546 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

To know, when two authorities are up, 
[Neither able to rule] . 
Neither supreme, how soon confusion 
May enter twixt the gap of both, and take 
The one by the other. 

Com. Well, — on to the market place. 

Cor. Whoever gave that counsel, to give forth 

The corn 0' the store-house gratis, as 'twas used 
Sometime in Greece* 

Men. Well, well, no more of that, 

Cor. Though there the people had more absolute power, 
I say they nourished disobedience, fed 
The ruin of the state. 

.Bru. Why shall the people give 

One that speaks thus their voice 1 

Cor. I'll give my reasons, 

More worthier than their voices. They know the corn 
Was not our recompense ; resting well assured 
They ne'er did service for it? 

Well, what then ] 
How shall this bosom multiplied, digest ; 
The senate's courtesy ? Let deeds express 
What's like to be their words. We did request it, 
We are the greater poll, and in true fear 
They gave us our demands. Thus we debase 
The nature of our seats, and make the rabble 
Call our cares, fears: which will in time break ope 
The locks 0' the senate, and bring in the crows 
To peck the eagles. 

Mem. Come, enough. 

Bru. Enough, with over measure. 

Cor. No, take more ; 

What may be sworn by, both divine and human, 
Seal what I end withal ! This double worship, — 
Where one part does disdain with cause, the other 
Insult without all reason ; where gentry, title, wisdom, 
Cannot conclude, but by the yea and no 



* It is not corn, but the property of the state, and its appropriation, we 
talk of here. Whether the absolute power be in the hands of the people 
or 'their officer.' There had been a speech made on that subject, which 
had not met with the approbation of the absolute power then conduct- 
ing the affairs of this realm ; and in its main principle, it is repeated 
here. ' That was my speech, and I will make it again.' ' Not now, 
not now. Not in this heat, sir, now.' ' Now, as I live, I will.' 



THE WRESTLING INSTANCE. 547 

Of General Ignorance — it must omit 

Real necessities, and give way the while 

To unstable slightness. Purpose so barred it follows 

Nothing is done to purpose : Therefore beseech you, — 

[Therefore beseech, you]. 
You that will be less fearful than discreet ; 
That love the fundamental part of state, 
More than you doubt the change of 't — 

There was but one man in England then, able to balance 

this revolutionary proposition so nicely — so curiously ; ' that 

love the fundamental part of state more than you doubt the 

change of it' ; ' You that are less fearful than discreet ' — not 

so fearful as discreet. 

that prefer 
A noble life before a long, and wish 
To jump a body with a dangerous physic 
That's sure of death without it, — at once pluck out 
The multitudinous tongue; let them not lick 
The sweet which is their poison ; your dishonour 
Mangles true judgment, and bereaves the state 
Of that integrity which should become it : 
Not having the power to do the good it would, 
For the ill which doth control it. 
Bru. He has said enough. 

[One would think so] . 

* 

Sic. He has spoken like a traitor, and shall answer 

As traitors do. 
Cor. Thou wretch ! despite o'erwhelm thee ! 

What should the people do with these bald tribunes ? 

On whom depending, their obedience fails 

To the greater bench ? In a rebellion, 

When what's not meet, but what must be was law 

Then were they chosen : in a better hour, 

Let what is meet, be said it must be meet, 

And throw their power i' the dust. 
Bru. Manifest treason. 

Sic. This a Consul 1 No. 
Bru. The iEdiles ! ho ! let him be apprehended. 
Sic. Go call the people ; [Exit Brutus'] in whose name, myself 

Attach thee [thee] as a traitorous innovator, 

A foe to the public weal. Obey, I charge thee, 

And follow to thine answer. 
Cor. Hence, old goat ! 

N N 2 



548 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

Senators and Patricians. We'll surety him. 

Cor. Hence, rotten thing, or I shall shake thy bones 

Out of thy garments. 
Sic. Help, ye citizens. 

[Re-enter Brutus, with the JEdiles, and a rabble of citizens. 
Men. On both sides, more respect. 
Sic. There's he that would 

Take from you all your power. 
Bru. Seize him, JEdiles. 

Cit. Down with him. Down with him. 

[Several speak. 
Second Sen. Weapons ! Weapons ! Weapons ! 

[They all bustle about Coriolanus. 

Tribunes, patricians : — citizens : — what ho : — 

Sicinius, Brutus : — Coriolanus : — citizens: — 
Cit. Peace I — Peace ! — Peace ! — stay ! — hold ! — peace ! 
Men. What is about to be ? 1 am out of breath : 

Confusion's near! I cannot speak : you tribunes 

To the people. — Coriolanus, patience : — 

Speak, good Sicinius. 
Sic. Hear me, people ; — Peace. 

Cit. Let's hear our tribune : — Peace, — Speak, speak, speak. 
Sic. You are at point to lose your liberties, 

Marcius would have all from you ; Marcius 

Whom late you have named for consul. 
Men. Fye, fye, fye. 

That is the way to kindle, not to quench. 
. Sen. To unbuild the city and to lay all flat. 
Sic. What is the city, but the people. 
Cit. True, 

The people are the city. 
Bru. By the consent of all, we were established 

The people's magistrates. 
Cit. You so remain. 

Men. And so are like to do. 
Cor. That is the way to lay the city flat, 

To bring the roof to the foundation ; 

And bury all which yet distinctly ranges, 

In heaps and piles of ruin. 
Sic. This deserves death. 

Bru. Or let us stand to our authority, 

Or let us lose it : — 

Truly, one hears the Kevolutionary voices here. Observing 
the history which is in all men's lives, ' Figuring the nature of 
the times deceased, a man may prophesy,' as it would seem, 



THE WRESTLING INSTANCE. 549 

' with a near aim,' 1 — quite near — ' of the main chance of 
things, as yet, not come to life, which in their weak beginnings 
lie intreasured. Such things become the hatch and brood of 
time,'' this Poet says ; but art, it seems, anticipates that process. 
There appears to be more of the future here, than of the times 
deceased. 

Bru. We do here pronounce 

Upon the part of the people, in whose power 

We were elected theirs, Marcius is worthy 

Of present death. 
Sic. Therefore, lay hold of him ; 

Bear him to the rock Tarpeian, and from thence 

Into destruction cast him. 
Bru. iEdiles, seize him. 

Cit. Yield, Marcius, yield. 
Men. Hear me, one word. 

Beseech you, tribunes, hear me, but a word. 
JEdiles. Peace, peace. 

Men. Be that you seem, truly your country's friend, 

And temperately proceed to what you would 

Thus violently redress. 
Bru. Sir, those cold ways 

That seem like prudent helps, are very poisonous. 

Where the disease is violent. — Lay hands upon him, 

And bear him to the rock. 
Cor. No: I'll die here. [Drawing his sword. 

There's some among you have beheld me fighting ; 

Come try upon yourselves, what you have seen me. 
Men. Down with that sword ; tribunes, withdraw awhile. 
Bru. Lay hands upon him. 
Men. Help, help, Marcius, help ! 

You that be noble, help him, young and old. 
Cit. Down with him ! Down with him ! 

1 In this mutiny, the Tribunes, the yEdiles, and the People, are 
all BEAT IN,' so the stage direction informs us, which appears 
a little singular, considering there is but one sword drawn, and 
the victorious faction does not appear to have the advantage in 
numbers. It is, however, only a temporary success, as the vic- 
tors seem to be aware. 

Men. Go, get you to your houses, be gone away, 
All will be nought else. 
/Second Sen. Get you gone. 



550 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

Cor. Stand fast, 

We have as many friends as enemies. 
Men. Shall it be put to that 1 
Sen. The gods forbid I 

I pry'thee noble friend, home to thy house ; 

Leave tts to cure this cause. 
Men. For 'tis a sore upon us, 

You cannot tent yourself. Begone, beseech you. 
Com. Come, Sir, along with us. 
Cor. I would they were barbarians (as they are, 

Though in Rome littered) not Romans, (as they are not, 

Though calved i' the porch o' the Capitol). 
Men. Begone ; 

Put not your worthy rage into your tongue ; 

One time will owe another. [Hear. 

Cor. On fair ground, 

I could beat/or^ of them. 
Men. I could myself 

Take up a brace of the best of them ; yea, the two 
tribunes. 
Com. But now 'tis odds beyond arithmetic : 

And manhood is called foolery, when it stands 

Against a falling fabric. — Will you hence, 

Before the tag return 1 whose rage doth rend 

Like interrupted waters, and overbear 

What they are used to bear. [Change of 'predominance.'] 
Men. Pray you, begone : 

I'll try whether my old wit be in request 

With those that have but little ; this must be patched 

With cloth of any colour. 
Com. Nay, come away. 

The features of that living impersonation of the heroic 
faults and virtues which. ' the mirror,' that professed to give to 
'the very body of the time, its form and pressure,' could not 
fail to show, are glimmering here constantly in ' this ancient 
piece/ and often shine out in the more critical passages, with 
such unmistakeable clearness, as to furnish an effectual diver- 
sion for any eye, that should undertake to fathom prematurely 
the player's intention. For ' the gentleman who wrote the 
late Shepherd's Calendar ' was not the only poet of this time, 
as it would seem, who found the scope of a double intention, in 
his poetic representation, not adequate to the comprehension 
of his design — who laid on another and another still, and found 



THE WKESTLING INSTANCE. 55 1 

the complexity convenient. ' The sense is the best judge/ 
this Poet says, in his doctrine of criticism, declining perempt- 
orily to accept of the ancient rules in matters of taste ; — a 
rule in art which requires, of course, a corresponding rule of 
interpretation. In fact, it is no bad exercise for an ordinary 
mind, to undertake to track the contriver of these plays, through 
all the latitudes which his art, as he understands it, gives him. 
It is as good for that purpose, as a problem in mathematics. 
But, ' to whom you will not give an hour, you give nothing/ 
he says, and ' he had as lief not be read at all, as be read by a 
careless reader.' So he thrusts in his meanings as thick as ever 
he likes, and those who don't choose to stay and pick them 
out, are free to lose them. They are not the ones he laid them 
in for, — that is all. He is not afraid, but that he will have readers 
enough, ere all is done; and he can afford to wait. There's 
time enough. 

First Pat. This man has marr'd his fortune. 

Men. His nature is too noble for the world : 

He would not flatter Neptune for his trident, 

Or Jove for his power to thunder. His heart's his mouth ; 

What his breast forges, that his tongue must vent ; 

And being angry, does forget that ever 

He heard the name of death. 

[A noise within. 

Here's goodly work ! 
JSecondPat. I would they were a-bed ! 

Men. I would they were in Tyber ! — What, the vengeance, 

Could he not speak them fair 1 

[Re-enter Brutus and Sicinius with the Rabble. 
Sic. Wheke is this viper, 

That would depopulate the city,* and 

Be evert man himself ? 
Men. You worthy tribunes — 

Sic. He shall be thrown down the Tarpeian rock 

With rigorous hands ; he hath resisted law, 

And therefore law shall scorn him further trial. 



* ' When could they say till now that talked of Eome that her wide 
walls encompassed but one man V 'What trash is Rome, what rubbish, 
and what oft'al, when it serves for the base matter to illuminate so 
vile a thing as Caesar.' 



552 THE CURE OP THE COMMON-WEAL. 

Than the severity of the public power, 

Which he so sets at nought. 
First Cit. He shall well know 

The noble tribunes are the people's mouths, 

And we their hands. 

[Historical principles — newly put. There's a cue 
for action in them] . 
Cit. He shall sure orit. [Several speak together. 

Men. Sir 

Sic. Peace. 

Men. Do not cry havoc, where you should but Mint 

With modest warrant. 
Sic. Sir, how comes it, that you 

Have holp to make this rescue 1 
Men. Hear me speak. — 

As I do know the Consul's worthiness, 

So can I name his faults. 
Sic. Consul ! — what Consul ? 

Men. The Consul Coriolanus. 
Bru. He a Consul ! 

Cits. No, no, no, no, no. [a 'negative' — revocation], 

Men. If, by the tribune's leave, and yours, good people, 

I may be heard, I' d crave a word or two ; 

The which shall turn you to no further harm, 

Than so much loss of time. 
Sic. Speak briefly then ; 

For we are peremptory, to despatch 

This viperous traitor : to eject him hence 

Were but one danger ; and to keep him here, — 
[All the questions have to come up here it seems]. 

and to keep him here, 

Our certain death ; therefore it is decreed 

He dies to-night. 
Men. Now the good gods forbid, 

That our renowned Rome, whose gratitude 

Towards her deserved children is enrolled 

In Jove's own book, like an unnatural dam 

Should now eat up her own ! 
Sic. He 's a disease that must be cut away. 

The analogy of physical disease which in the first scene of 
this play is applied with such scientific detail, in the story 
of Menenius Agrippa, to the convulsed and labouring organi- 
zation of the body politic, continues to furnish the author, 



THE WRESTLING INSTANCE. 553 

throughout, with much of that kind of illustration in which 
his works are so prolific, an illustration which is not rhetorical, 
but scientific, based on the common principles in nature, 
which it is his 'primary' business to ascend to, and which it 
is his ' second' business to apply to each particular branch of 
art. ' Neither/ as he tells us plainly, in his Book of Advance- 
ment, ' neither are these only similitudes as men of narrow 
observation may conceive them to be, but the same footsteps of 
nature, treading or printing upon several subjects or matters,' 
and the tracking of these historical principles to their ultimate 
forms, is that which he recommends for the disclosing of nature 
and the abridging of Art. 

Sic. He 's a disease, that must be cut away. 
Men. O he 's a limb, that has but a disease ; 

Mortal to cut it off ; to cure it, easy. 

"What has he done to Rome, that's worthy death ? 

Killing our enemies ? The blood he hath lost, 

(Which, I dare vouch, is more than that he hath, 

By many an ounce), he dropped it for his country. 

And what is left, to lose it by his country, 

Were to us all, that dd't and suffer it, 

A brand to the end d the world. 
Sic. This is clean kam, 

There's a piece thrust in here. This is the one of whom 
he says in another scene, 1 1 cannot speak him home.' 

Bru. Merely awry : when he did love his country, 

It honour'd him. 
Men. The service of the foot,. 

Being once gangreiHd, is not then respected 

For what before it was ? 
Bru. We '11 hear no more : — 

Pursue him to his house, and pluck him thence ; 

Lest his infection, being of catching nature, 

Spread further. 
Men. One word more, one word. 

This tiger-footed rage, when it shall find 

The harm of unscann'd swiftness, will, too late, 

Tie leaden pounds to his heels. [Mark it, for it is a 
prophecy.] Proceed by Process ; 

Lest parties (as he is beloved) break out, 

And sack great Rome with Romans. 



554 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

Bru. If it were so, — 

Sic. What do ye talk ? 

Have we not had a taste of his obedience ? 

Our JEdiles smote ? Ourselves resisted ? — Come : — 
Men. Consider this ; he has been bred V the wars, 

Since he could draw a sword, — 

That has been the breeding of states, and nobility, and their 
rule, hitherto, as this play will show you. Consider what 
schooling these statesmen have had, before you begin the 
enterprise of reforming them, and take your measures accord- 
ingly. They are not learned men, you see. How should 
they be ? There has been no demand for learning. The law 
of the sword has prevailed hitherto. When what's not meet 
but what must be was law, then were they chosen. Proceed 
by process. 

Consider this ; he has been bred i' the wars 
Since he could draw a sword, and is ill schooFd 
In boulted language — 

[That's the trouble; but there's been a little bolting going 
on in this play]. 

— Meal and bran together 

He throws without distinction. Give me leave 

I '11 go to him, and undertake to bring him 

Where he shall answer by a lawful form, 

(In peace) to his utmost peril. 
First Sen. Noble tribunes. 

It is the humane way : the other course 

"Will prove too bloody ; and — 

[What is very much to be deprecated in such movements]. 

— the end of it, 

Unknown to the beginning. 
Sic. Noble Menenius ; 

Be you then as the People's Officer : 

Masters, — [and they seem to be that, truly,] — lay down your 
Bru. Co not home, [weapons. 

Sic. Meet on the market-place, — 

[ — that is where the ' idols of the market' are — ] 

Well attend you there : 

Where, if you bring not Marcius, we'll proceed 
In ouv first way. 



THE WRESTLING INSTANCE. 555 

Men. I'll bring him to you. 

Let me desire your company [To the Senators] He must come, 

Or what is worse will follow. 
Sen. Pray you, let 's to him. 

Scene — The Forum. 
Enter Sicinius and Brutus. 
Bru. In this point charge him home, that he affects 

Tyrannical power : if he evade us there, 

Enforce him with his envy to the people ; 

And that the spoil, got on the Antiates, 

Was ne'er distributed. — 

Enter an JEdile. 

What, will he come ? 
JEd. He's coming. 

Bru. - How accompanied ? 

JEd. With old Menenius, and those senators 

That always favour'd him. 
Sic. Have you a catalogue 

Of all the voices that we have procured, 

Set down by the poll 1* 
JEd. I have; His ready. 

Sic. Have you collected them by tribes 1 
Mid. I have. 

Sic. Assemble presently the people hither : 

And when they hear me say, it shall be so 

T the right and strength d the commons, be it either 

For death, for fine, or banishment, then let them, 

If /say fine, cry fine ; if death, cry death; 

Insisting on the old prerogative, 

And power H the truth, o' the cause.+ 
JEd. I shall inform them. 

Bru. And when such time they have begun to cry, 

Let them not cease, but with a din confused 

Enforce the present execution 

Of what we chance to sentence. 
JEd. Very well. 

Sic. Make them be strong, and ready for this hint. 

When we shall hap to give't them. 
Bru. Go about it. 

[Exit JEdile. 

* This can not be the book that Hamlet was reading. ' What do you 
read, my lord V 'Words, words, words.' 

t There is a great difference in the delivery of the mathematics, 
which are the most abstracted of knowledges, and policy, which is the 
most immersed. — Advancement of Learning. 



556 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

Put him to choler straight. He hath heen used 

Ever to conquer, and to Lave his worth 

Of contradiction. Being once chafed, he cannot 

Be rein'd again to temperance ; then he speaks 

What's in his heart ; and that is there, which looks 
With me to break his neck. [Prophecy — inductive.] 

Well, here he comes. 
Enter Coriolanus, and his party. 
Men. Calmly, I do beseech you. 

Cor. Ay, as an ostler, that for the poorest piece 

Will bear the knave by the volume. The honour'd gods 

Keep Rome in safety, and the chairs of justice 

Supplied with worthy men ! plant love among us. 

Throng odr large temples with the shows of peace, 

And not our streets with war. 
First Sen. Amen, Amen I [Hear, Hear ! 

Men. A noble wish. 

Re-enter JEdile with Citizens. 
Sic. Draw near, ye people. 
Cor. First hear me speak. 

JEdile. List to your tribunes. Audience : Peace, I say. 
Both Tri. Well, say, — Peace, ho. 

Cor. Shall I be charged no further than this present ? 

Must all determine here 1 
Sic. I do demand, 

If you submit you to the people's voices, 

Allow their officers, and are content 

To suffer lawful censure for suchfaidts 

As shall be proved upon you ? 
Cor. I am content. 

Men. Lo, citizens, he says he is content 

Cor. What is the matter, 

That being pass'd for consul, with full voice, 

I am so dishonour' d, that the very hour 

You take it off again ? 
Sic. Answer to us. 

Cor. Say then, 'tis true. / ought so. 
Sic. We charge you, that you have contrived to take 

From Rome, all seasoned office, and to wind 

Yourself into a power tyrannical ; 

For which, you are a traitor to the people. 
Cor. How ! Traitor ? 

Men. Nay, temperately : Your promise. 

Cor. The fires in the lowest hell fold in the people ! 

Call me their traitor ! 
Cit. To the rock, to the rock with him. 



THE WRESTLING INSTANCE. 557 

Sic. Peace. 

We need not put new matter to his charge : 
"What you have seen him do, and heard him speak, 
Beating your officers, cursing yourselves, 
Opposing laws with strokes, and here defying 
Those whose great power must try him ; even this, 
So criminal, and in such capital kind, 
Deserves the extremest death. 

For that he has, 
As much as in him lies, from time to time, 
Envied against the people ; seeking means 
To pluck away their power : as now, at last, 
Given hostile strokes, and that, not in the presence 
Of dreaded justice, but on the ministers 
That do distribute it ; in the name 0' the people, 
And in the power of us, the tribunes, we, 
Even from this instant, banish him our city, 
In peril of precipitation 
From off the rock Tarpeian, never more 
To enter our Rome's gates. T the people's name 
/ say it shall be so. 

Cit. It shall be so, it shall be so : let him away, 
He's banish'd, and it shall be so. 

Com. Hear me, my masters, and my common friends. 

Sic He's sentenced : no more hearing. 

Com. Let me speak : — 

Bru. There's no more to be said, but he is banished, 
As enemy to the people, and his country : 
It shall be so. 

Cit. It shall be so, it shall be so. 

And this is the story that was set before a king ! One, 
too, who was just then bestirring himself to get the life of 
e that last king of England who was his ancestor ' brought out ; 
a king who was taking so much pains to get his triple wreath 
of conquest brightened up, and all the lines in it laid out and 
distinguished — one who was taking so much pains to get the 
fresh red of that last 'conqueror,' who also 'came in by battle,' 
cleared up in his coat of arms, in case his double line of white 
and red from the old Norman should not prove sufficient — 
sufficient to convince the English nation of his divine right, and 
that of his heirs for ever, to dispose of it and its weal at his and 
their pleasure, with or without laws, as they should see fit. A 



558 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

pretty scene this to amuse a king with, whose ancestor, the 
one from whom he directly claimed, had so lately seated him- 
self and his line by battle — by battle with the English people 
on those very questions; who had 'beaten them in' in their 
mutinies with his single sword, 'and taken all from them'; 
who had planted his chair of state on their suppressed liberties, 
and ' the charters that they bore in the body of the weal' — 
that chair which was even then beginning to rock a little — 
while there was that in the mien and bearing of the royal 
occupant and his heir which might have looked to the pre- 
scient mind, if things went on as they were going then, not 
unlike to break some one's neck. 

' Bid them home,' 
says the Tribune, after the military hero is driven out by the 
uprisen people, with shouting, from the city gates for ever; 
charged never more to enter them, on peril of precipitation 
from the Tarpeian Rock. 

' Bid them home : 

Say, their great enemy is gone, and they 

Stand in their ancient strength? 

But it is in the conquered nation that this scene of the 
deposing of the military power is completed. Of course one 
could not tell beforehand what effect that cautious, but on the 
whole luminous, exhibition of the recent conquest of the English 
PEOPLE, prepared at the suggestion and under the immediate 
criticism of royalty, might have with the profoundly loyal 
English people themselves, in the way of ' striking an awe 
into them,' and removing any lurking opposition they might 
have to the exercise of an arbitrary authority in government; 
but with people of the old Volscian pluck, according to this 
Poet's account of the matter, an allusion to a similar success on 
the part of the Conqueror at a critical moment, and when his 
special qualifications for government happened to be passing 
under review, was not attended with those happy results which 
appear to have been expected in the other instance. 

' If you have writ your annals true, 't is there, 
That like an eagle in a dove-cote, I 



THE WRESTLING INSTANCE. 559 

Flutter'd your Volsces in Corioli : 
Alone, I did it? 

1 Why 

[The answer is, in this case,] 

' Why, noble lords, 
Will you he put in mind of his blind fortune, 
Which was your shame, by this unholy braggart, 
'Fore your own eyes and ears f 
Cons. Let him die for 't. [Several speak at once.] 

Citizens [Speaking promiscuously]. Tear him to pieces ; do 
it presently. He killed my son — my daughter; — he killed my 

cousin Marcus ; — he killed my father 

O that I had him, 
With six Aufidiuses, or more, his tribe, 
To use my law/id sword. 

Insolent villain ! 
.... Traitor ! — how now 1 . . . . 
Ay, traitor, Marcius. 

Marcius ? 
Ay, Marcius, Caius Marcius. Dost thou think 
I'll grace thee with that robbery — thy stolen name, 
Coriolanus, in Corioli 1 . . . . 
[. . . . Honest, my lord 1 * Ay, honest.'] 
Cons. Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill him.' 

' Would you proceed especially against Caius Marcius ? 
Against him first.' 

Surely, if that ' Heir apparent' to whom the History of 
Henry the Seventh was dedicated by the author, with an 
urgent recommendation of the ' rare accidents' in that reign to 
the royal notice and consideration; if that prince had but 
chanced in some thoroughly thoughtful mood to light upon 
this yet more ' ancient piece/ he might have found here, also, 
some things worthy of his notice. It cannot be denied, that 
the poet's mode of handling the same historical question is 
much more bold and clear than that of the professed philo- 
sopher. But probably this Prince was not aware that his 
father entertained at Whitehall then, not a literary Historian, 
merely — a Book-maker, able to compose narratives of the 
past in an orderly chronological prosaic manner, according to 
the received method — but a Show-man, also, an Historical 



560 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

Show-man, with such new gifts and arts; a true Magician, 
who had in his closet a mirror which possessed the property of 
revealing, not the past nor the present only, but the future, 
' with a near aim/ an aim so near that it might well seem 
' magical' ; and that a cloud was flaming in it, even then, ' which 
drizzled blood upon the Capitol.' This Prince of Wales did 
not know, any more than his father did, that they had in their 
court then an historical scholar, with such an indomitable 
passion for the stage, with such a decided turn for acting — 
one who felt himself divinely prompted to a part in that 
theatre which is the Globe — one who had laid out all for his 
share in that. They did not either of them know, fortunately 
for us, that they had in their royal train such an Historic 
Sport-Man ager, such a Prospero for Masques; that there was a 
true ' Phil-harmonus' there, with so clear an inspiration of 
scientific statesmanship. They did not know that they had in 
that servant of the crown, so supple, so e patient — patient as 
the midnight sleep/ patient ' as the ostler that for the poorest 
piece will bear the knave by the volume' — such a born 
aspirant for rule; one who had always his eye on the throne, 
one who had always in mind their usurpation of it. They did 
not know that they had a Hamlet in their court, who never 
lost sight of his purpose, or faltered in his execution of it; 
who had found a scientific ground for his actions, an end for 
his ends; who only affected incoherence; and that it was he 
who was intriguing to such purpose with the Players. 

The Elizabethan revolutionist was suppressed: then 'Fame, 
who is the posthumous sister of rebellion , sprang up.' 

' O like a book of sports thou 'It read me o'er, 
But there 's more in me than thou 'It understand.' 

' Henceforth guard thee well, 
For I '11 not kill thee there, nor there, nor there ; 
But by the forge that stithied Mars his helm, 
I '11 kill thee everywhere, yea o'er and o'er.' 



CONCLUSION. 561 



CHAPTER XIII. 

CONCLUSION. 

' How I have thought of this, and of these times, 
I shall recount hereafter, 

and find a time 

Both meet to hear and answer such high things. 
Till then, my noble friend, chew upon this; 
Brutus had rather be a village?', 
Than to repute himself a son of Rome, 
Under these hard conditions as this time 
Is like to lay upon us. 

TNASMUCH as the demonstration contained in this volume 
has laboured throughout under this disadvantage, that 
however welcome that new view of the character and aims 
of the great English philosopher, which is involved in it, as 
welcome it must be to all true lovers of learning, it presents 
itself to the mind of the reader as a view directly opposed, not 
merely to what may possibly be his own erroneous precon- 
ceptions of the case; but to facts which are among the most 
notable in the history of this country; and not only to facts 
sustained by unquestionable cotemporary authority, and attested 
by public documents, — facts which history has graven with her 
pen of iron in the rock for ever, but with other exhibitions 
of this man's character, not less, but more painful, for which 
he is himself singly responsible; — not the forced exhibition 
of a confession wrung from him by authority, — not the 
craven self-blasting defamation of a gloricfus name that was 
not his to blast, — that was the property of men of learning in 
all coming ages, precious and venerable in their eyes for ever, 
at the bidding of power, — not that only, but the voluntary 
exhibition of those qualities with which he stands charged, — 
which he has gone out of his way to leave to us, — memorials 

o o 



562 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

of them which he has collected with his own hands, and 
sealed up, and sent down to posterity ' this side up/ with 
the most urgent directions to have them read, and examined, 
and considered deeply, — that posterity, too, to which he com- 
mends, with so much assurance, the care of his honor, the 
cure of his fame. 

The demonstrated fact must stand. The true mind must 
receive it. Because our criticism or our learning is not equal 
to the task of reconciling it with that which we know already, 
or with that which we believed, and thought we knew, we must 
not on that account reject it. That is to hurt ourselves. That 
is to destroy the principle of integrity, at its source. We 
must take our facts and reconcile them, if we can; and let 
them take care of themselves, if we can not. God is greater 
than we are, and whatever other sacrifices he may require of 
us, painful to our human sensibilities, to make way with facts, 
for the sake of advancing truths, or for any other reason never 
so plausible, is a thing which he never does, and never did 
require of any mind. The conclusion that requires facts to be 
dispensed with, or shorn, on either side to make it tenable, 
is not going to stand, let it come in what name, or with 
what authority it will; because the truth of history is, in its 
least particular, of a universal quality, and is much more 
potent than anything that the opinion and will of man can 
oppose to it. 

To the mind which is able to receive under all conditions 
the demonstrated truth, and give to it its full weight, — to 
the mind to which truth is religion, this book is dedicated. 
The facts which it contains are able to assert themselves, — 
will be, at least, hereafter. They will not be dependent ulti- 
mately upon the mode of their exhibition here. For they 
have the large quality, they have the solidity and dimen- 
sions of historical truth, and are accessible on more sides 
than one. 

But to those to whom they are already able to commend 
themselves in the form in which they are here set forth, the 
author begs leave to say, in conclusion, though it must stand 



CONCLUSION. 563 

for the present in the form of a simple statement, but a state- 
ment which challenges investigation, that so far from coming 
into any real collision with the evidence which we have on 
this subject from other sources, those very facts, and those 
very historical materials on which our views on this subject 
have been based hitherto, are, that which is wanting to the 
complete development of the views contained here. 

It is the true history of these great events in which the 
hidden great men of this age played so 'deep a part; it is the 
true history of that great crisis in which the life-long plots of 
these hidden actors began to show themselves on the historic 
surface in scenic grandeur, — in those large tableaux which 
history takes and keeps, — which history waits for, — it is the 
very evidence which has supplied the principal basis of the 
received views on this subject, — it is the history of the 
initiation of that great popular movement, — that movement 
of new ages, with which the chief of popular development, 
and the leader of these ages, has been hitherto so painfully 
connected in our impressions; it is that very evidence, — that 
blasting evidence which the Learning of the Modern Ages 
has always carried in its stricken heart, — it is that which is 
wanting here. That also is a part of the story which has 
begun to be related here. 

And those very letters which have furnished ' confirmations 
strong as proofs of holy writ' of the impressions which the 
other historical evidence, as it stands at present, inevitably 
creates, — those very letters which have been collected by the 
party whose character was concerned in them, and preserved 
with so much diligence and caution, — which we have been 
asked with so much emphasis to read and ponder, — which 
have been recommended to our attention as the very best 
means, when all is done, of putting ourselves into sympathetic 
relations with the writer, and attaining at last to a complete 
understanding of his position, and to a complete acquaintance 
with his character and aims, — with his natural dispositions, as 
well as his deliberate scientific aims, — these letters, long as we 
have turned from them, — often as we have turned from them, 

o o 2 



564 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

— chilled, confounded, sick at heart, — unable, in spite of 
those recommendations, to find in them any gleam of the soul 
of these proceedings, — these very letters will have to be read, 
after all, and with that very diligence which the directions 
enjoin upon us; they will have, when all is done, to take just 
that place in the development of this plot which the author, 
who always knows what he is about when he is giving direc- 
tions, designed them to take. There is one very obvious 
reason why they should be studied — why they would have 
to be studied in the end. They have on the face of them a 
claim to the attention of the learned. There is nothing like 
them in the history of mankind. For, however mean and 
disreputable the acts of men may be, when it comes to words, 

— that medium of understanding and sympathy, in which the 
identity of the common nature is perpetually declared, even in 
the most private conferences, — there is usually an attempt to 
clothe the forlorn and shrinking actuality with the common 
human dignity, or to make it, at least, passably respectable, if 
the claim to the heroic is dispensed with, — even in oral 
speech. But in writing, in letters, destined to never so brief 
and limited an existence, who puts on paper for the eye of 
another, for the review of that criticism which in the lowest, 
basest of mankind, stands in unimpeachable dignity, prepared 
to detect and pass sentence, and cry out as one aggrieved, on 
the least failure, or shadow of failure in the best — who puts in 
writing, — what tenant of Newgate will put on paper, when it 
comes to that, a deliberate display of meanness, — what con- 
victed felon, but will undertake in that case to give some sort 
of heroic colour to his proceedings — some air of suffering 
virtue to his durance? 

But a great man, consciously great, who knows that his 
most trifling letter is liable to publication; a great man, 
writing on subjects and occasions which insure publicity to 
his writing; a man of fame, writing letters expressly for 
publication, and dedicating them to the far-off times; a man 
of poetic sensibilities, alive to the finest shades of moral 
differences; one of unparalleled dignity and grandeur of 



CONCLUSION. 565 

aims — aims pursued from youth to age, without wavering, 
under the most difficult conditions, pursued to their suc- 
cessful issue; a man whose aim in life it was to advance, 
and ennoble, and enrich his kind; in whose life-success the 
race of men are made glad ; such a one sending down along 
with the works, in which the nobility and the deliberate worth 
and grandeur of his ends are set forth and proved, memorials 
of himself which exhibit studiously on the surface of them, 
by universal consent, the most odious character in history; 
this is the phenomenon which our men of learning iiave found 
themselves called upon to encounter here. To separate the 
man and the philosopher — to fly out upon the man, to throw 
him overboard with every expression of animosity and disgust, 
to make him out as bad as possible, to collect diligently every 
scrap of evidence against him, and set it forth with every con- 
ceivable aggravation — this has been the resource of an in- 
dignant scholarship in this case, bent on uttering its protest in 
some form; this has been the defence of learning, cast down 
from its excellency, and debased in all men's eyes, as it seemed 
for ever, in the person of its high -priest. 

The objection to the work here presented to the public is, 
that it does not go far enough. From the point of review that 
the research of which it is the fruit has now attained, this is 
the criticism to which it appears to be liable. From this point 
of view, the complaint to be made against it is, that at the 
place where it stops it leaves, for want of that part of the 
evidence which contains it, the historical grandeur of our great 
men unrevealed or still obscured. For we have had them, in 
the sober day -light of our occidental learning, in the actua- 
lities of history, and not in the mists of a poetic past only — 
monstrous idealisms, outstretched shadows of man's divinity, 
demi-gods and heroes, impersonations of ages and peoples, 
stalking through the twilight of the ante-historic dawn, or 
in the twilight of a national popular ignorance, embalmed in 
the traditions of those who are always ' beginners.' We have 
had them ; we need not look to a foreign and younger race for 
them ; we have them, fruit of our own stock ; we have had them, 



566 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

not cloaked with falseness, but exposed in the searching noon- 
day glare of our western science. We have had them, we have 
them still, with all their mortal frailty and littleness and 
ignorance confessed, with all their c weaved-up follies ravelled 
out,' with all the illimitable capacity of affection and passion 
and will in man, with all his illimitable capacity for folly and 
wrong-doing, assumed and acknowledged in their own per- 
sons, symbolically, vicariously, assumed and confessed. ' I 
am very proud, revengeful, ambitious; with more offences at 
my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to 
give them shape, or time to act them in/ We have them, 
our Interpreters, our Poets, our Reformers, who start from the 
actualities — from the actualities of nature in general, and of 
the human nature in particular — who make the most careful 
study of man as he is, in themselves and in all men, the basis 
of their innovation, the begirming of their advancement to the 
ideal or divine. We have them; and they, too, they also 
come to us, with that old garland of glory on their brows, 
with that same ' crown' of victory, which the world has given 
from of old to those who have taken her affairs to be their 
business. 

That the historical evidence which lies on the surface of an 
age, like that age from which our modern philosophy proceeds, 
is of a kind to require, for its unravelling, a different species of 
criticism from that which suffices for the historical evidence 
which our own times and institutions produce, is a fact which 
would hardly seem to require any illustration in the present 
state of our historical knowledge, in the present state of our 
knowledge in regard to the history of this age in particular; 
when not the professed scholar only, but every reader, knows 
what age in the constitutional history of England, at least, that 
age was; when we have here, not the erudite historian only, 
with his rich harvests for the scholar, that are caviare to the 
multitude, but the Poets of history also, wresting from dull 
prose and scholasticism its usurped domains, and giving back 
to the peoples their own, to tell us what age this was. The 
inner history of this time is indeed still wanting to us; and 



CONCLUSION. 567 

the reason is, that we have not yet applied to the reading of 
its principal documents that key of times which our contem- 
porary historians have already put into our hands — that key 
which, we are told on good authority, is, in certain cases, 
indispensable to the true interpretation. 

That the direct contemporary testimony on which history 
depends is, in this case, vitiated, tainted at its source, and 
through all its details — that the documents are all of them, 
on the face of them, ' suspicious/ and not fit to be received as 
historical evidence without the severest scrutiny and re-exami- 
nation — this is the fact which remains to be taken into the 
account here. For this is a case in which the witnesses come 
into court, making signs, seeking with mute gesticulation to 
attract our attention, pointing significantly to the difficulties 
of the position, asking to be cross-examined, soliciting a 
second cogitation on what they say, telling us that they mor- 
tally hate obscurity, and would avoid it if they could ; inti- 
mating that if their testimony should be re-examined in a 
higher court, and when the Star Chamber and the Court of 
Ecclesiastical Commission are no longer in session, it might 
perhaps be found to be susceptible of a different reading. 
This is a case in which the party convicted comes in with his 
finger on his lips, and an appeal to another tribunal, to another 
age. 

We all know what age in the history of the immemorial 
liberties and dignities of a race — what age in the history of 
its recovered liberties, rescued from oppression and recognised 
and confirmed by statute, this was. We know it was an age 
in which the decisions of the Bench were prescribed to it by a 
power that had ' the laws of England at its commandment,' 
that it was an age in which Parliament, and the press, and 
the pulpit, were gagged, and in which that same justice had 
charge, diligent charge ' of amusements also, and of those who 
only played at working.' That this was a time when the Play 
House itself, — in that same year, too, in which these philoso- 
phical plays began first to attract attention, and again and 
again, was warned off by express ordinances from the whole 



568 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

ground of ' the forbidden questions.' We know that this was 
an age in which not the books of the learned only were 
subjected to ' the press and torture which expulsed' from them 
all those ' particulars that point to action' — action, at least, in 
which the common-weal of men is most concerned; that it 
was a time when the private manuscript was subjected to that 
same censorship and question, and corrected with those same 
instruments and engines, which made then a regular part of 
the machinery of the press; when the most secret cabinet of 
the Statesman and the Man of Letters must be kept in order 
for that revision, when his most confidential correspondence, 
his private note-book and diary must be composed under these 
restrictions; when in the church, not the pulpit only, but the 
secrets of the study, were explored for proofs of opposition to 
the power then predominant; when the private desk and 
drawers of the poor obscure country clergyman were ran- 
sacked, and his half- formed studies of sermons, his rude 
sketches and hypothetical notes of sermons yet to be — which 
might or might not be — put down for private purposes 
perhaps, and never intended to be preached — were produced 
by Government as an excuse for subjecting him to indignities 
and cruelties to which those practised upon the Duke of Kent 
and the Duke of Gloster, in the play, formed no parallel. 

To the genius of a race in whose mature development specu- 
lation and action were for the first time systematically united, 
in the intensities of that great historical impersonation which 
signalises its first entrance upon the stage of human affairs, 
stimulated into preternatural activity by that very opposition 
which would have shut it out from its legitimate fields, and 
shut it up within those impossible, insufferable limits that the 
will of the one man prescribed to it then, — to that many-sided 
genius, bent on playing well its part even under those condi- 
tions, all the more determined on it by that very opposition — 
kept in mind of its manliness all the time by that all com- 
prehending prohibition on manhood, that took charge of 
every act — irritated all the time into a protesting human 
dignity by the perpetual meannesses prescribed to it, in- 



CONCLUSION. 569 

structed in the doctrine of the human nature and its nobility 
in the school of that sovereignty which was keeping such a 
costly ' crib' here then ; ' Let a beast be lord of beasts,' says 
Hamlet, ' and your crib shall stand at the king's mess;' 
' Would you have me false to my nature V says another, c rather 
say I play the man I am'; to that so conscious man, playing 
his part under these hard conditions, on a stage so high; 
knowing all the time what theatre that was he played it in, 
how l far' those long-drawn aisles extended; what 'far-off' 
crowding ages filled them, watching his slightest movements; 
who knew that he was acting ' even in the eyes of all posterity 
that wear this world out to the ending doom' ; to such a one 
studying out his part beforehand under such conditions, it was 
not one disguise only, it was not one secret literary instrumen- 
tality only, that sufficed for the plot of it. That toy stage 
which he seized and converted so effectually to his ends, with 
all its masks did not suffice for the exigencies of this speaker's 
speech, ' who came prepared to speak well,' and ' to give to 
his speech a grace by action.' 

Under these circumstances, the art of letter-writing presented 
itself to this invention, as a means of accomplishing objects to 
which other forms of writing did not admit then of being so 
readily adapted. It offered itself to this invention as a means 
of conducting certain plots, which inasmuch as they had the 
weal of men for their object, were necessarily conducted with 
secresy then. The whole play of that dramatic, genius which 
shaped our great dramatic poems, came out, not on the stage, 
but in these ' plots' in which the weal of the unborn genera- 
tions of men was the end ; those plots for the relief of man's 
estate which had to be plotted, like murders and highway 
robberies, then, by a banditti that had watch -words, and ' badges' 
and signals and private names, and a secret slang of their own. 

The minds that conducted this enterprise under these con- 
ditions, were minds conscious of powers equal, at least, to 
those of the Greeks, and who thought they had as good a 
right to invent new methods of literary communication, or to 
convert old ones to new uses as the Greeks had in their day. 



570 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

The speaker for this school was one who could not see why it 
was not just as lawful for the moderns to * invent new measures 
in verses/ at least, as in ' dances/ and why it was not just as 
competent for him to compose ' supposititious' letters for his 
purposes, as it was for Thucydides to compose speeches for his ; 
and though eloquence was, in this case, for the most part, 
dispensed with, these little every-day prosaic unassuming, 
apparently miscellaneous, scraps of life and business, shewing 
it up piece-meal as it was in passage, and just as it happened 
in which, of course, no one would think of looking for a com- 
prehensive design, became, in the hands of this artist, an 
invention quite as effective as the oratory of the ancient. 

The letters which came out on the trial of Essex, in the 
name of Sir Antony Bacon, but in which the hand of Mr. 
Francis Bacon appeared without much attempt at disguise, 
were not the only documents of that kind for which the 
name of the elder brother, with his more retiring and less 
' dangerous ' turn of mind, appeared to be, on the whole, the 
least objectionable. An extensive correspondence, which will 
tend to throw some light on the contemporary aspect of things 
when it is opened, was conducted in that gentleman's name, 
about those days. 

But much more illustrious persons, who were forced by the 
genius of this dramatist into his plots, were induced to lend 
their names and sanction to these little unobtrusive perform- 
ances of his, when occasion served. This was a gentleman 
who was in the habit of writing letters and arranging plots, 
for quite the most distinguished personages of his time. In 
fact, his powers were greatly in request for that purpose. For 
so far as the question of mere ability was concerned, it was found 
upon experiment, that there was nothing he stopped at. Under a 
sharp pressure, and when the necessary question of the Play 
required it, and nothing else would serve, it was found that he 
could compose e a sonnet' as well as a state paper, or a decision, 
or a philosophical treatise. He wrote a sonnet for Essex, 
addressed to Queen Elizabeth, on one very important occasion. 
If it was not any better than those attempts at lyrical expres- 



CONCLUSION. 571 

sion in another department of song, which he has produced as 
a specimen of his poetical abilities in general, it is not 
strange that Queen Elizabeth, who was a judge of poetry, 
should find herself able to resist the blandishments of that 
effusion. But it was not the royal favourite only, it was not 
Essex and Buckingham only, who were glad to avail them- 
selves of these so singular gifts, devoted to their use by one 
who was understood to have no other object in living, but to 
promote their ends, — one whose vast philosophic aims, — aims 
already propounded in all their extent and grandeur, pro- 
pounded from the first, as the ends to which the whole scheme 
of his life was to be — artistically — with the strong hand of 
that mighty artist, through all its detail subordinated, were 
supposed to be merged, lost sight of, forgotten in an irrepres- 
sible enthusiasm of devotion to the wishes of the person who 
happened, at the time, to be the sovereign's favourite; one 
whose great torch of genius and learning was lighted, as it was 
understood, — lighted and fed, to light them to their desires. 
Elizabeth herself, unwilling as she was to add any thing to the 
powers with which nature had crowned this man, instructed 
by her instinct, that ' such men were dangerous,' was willing, 
notwithstanding, to employ his peculiar gifts in services of this 
nature; and so was her successor. And the historical fact is, 
that an extraordinary amount of business of one kind and an- 
other, passed in consequence through this gentleman's hands 
in both these reigns, and perhaps no one was ever better quali- 
fied by constitutional endowments, and by a predominant ten- 
dency to what he calls technically ' active good,' for the dis- 
patch of business in which large and distant results were 
comprehended. And if in managing plots for these illustrious 
personages, he conducted them always with stedfast reference 
to his ulterior aims, — if, in writing letters for them, he wrote 
them always with the under-tones of his own part, — of his own 
immortal part that was to survive ' when tyrants' crests and 
tombs of brass were spent' running through them — if, in com- 
posing state papers and concocting legal advice, and legal deci- 
sions, he contrived to insert in them an inner meaning, and to 



572 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

point to the secret history which contained their solution, who 
that knows what those times were, who that knows to what 
divine ends this man's life was dedicated, shall undertake to 
blame him for it. 

All these papers were written with an eye to publication; 
thay were written for the future, but they were written in 
that same secret method, in that same 'cipher' which he has 
to stop to describe before he can introduce the subject of ' the 
principal and supreme sciences,' with the distinct assurance that 
as c matters stand then, it is an art of great use, though some 
may think he introduces it with its kindred arts, in that place, 
for the sake of making out a muster-roll of the sciences, and 
to little other purpose, and that trivial as these may seem in 
such a connexion, ' to those who have spent their labours 
and studies in them, they seem great matters,' appealing to 
' those who are skilful in them' to say whether he has not 
given, in what he has said of them, ' though in few words,' 
a proof of his proficiency. This was the method of writing 
in which not the principal and supreme sciences only, but 
every thing that was fit to be written at all had need to be 
written then. 

' Ciphers are commonly in letters, but may be in words.' 
Both these kinds of ciphers were employed in the writings of 
this school. The reading of that which is ' in letters, 3 the one 
in which letters are secretly employed as ' symbols ' of esoteric 
philosophic subtleties, is reserved for those who have found 
their way into the esoteric chambers of this learning. It is 
reserved for those who have read the ' Book of Sports and 
Kiddles,' which this school published, and who happen to have 
it with them when it happens to be called for; it is reserved 
for those who have circumvented Hamlet, and tracked him to his 
last lurking place, and plucked out the heart of his mystery; 
for those who have been in Prospero's island, and ' untied his 
spell.' This point gained, — the secret of the cipher 'in letters, 1 — 
the secret of ' the symbols,' and other ' devices ' and ' conceits ' 
which were employed in this school as a medium of secret 
philosophic correspondence, the characters in which these men 



conclusion. 573 

struck through the works they could not own then, the grand 
colossal symbol of the school, its symbol of universality, large 
as the world, enduring as the ages of the human kind, and 
with it — in it, their own particular ' marks ' and private signa- 
tures, — this mastered, — with the secret of this in our hands, 
the cipher ■ in words ' presents no difficulties, When we come 
to read the philosophical papers of this great firm in letters, 
with the aid of that discovery, we shall know what one of the 
partners of it means, when he says, that on ' account of the 
rawness and unskilfulness of the hands through which they 
pass, the greatest matters are sometimes carried in the weakest 
ciphers/ 

It was easy, for instance, in defining the position of the 
favourite in the Court of Queen Elizabeth, in recommending 
a civil rather than a military greatness as the one least likely 
to provoke the animosity and suspicion of government under 
those conditions, in recommending that so far from taking 
umbrage at the advancement of a rival — the policy of the 
position prescribed, the deliberate putting forward and sus- 
taining of another favourite to avert the jealousy and fatal 
suspicion with which, under such conditions, the government 
regards its favourite, when popularity and the qualities of a 
military chieftain are combined in him; it was easy in mark- 
ing out those grand points in the conditions of the chief 
courtiers' policy at that time, to glance at the position of other 
men in that same court, seeking for power under those same 
conditions — men whose position, inasmuch as the immediate 
welfare of society and the destinies of mankind in future ages 
were concerned in it, was infinitely more important than that 
of the person whose affairs were agitated on the surface of the 
letter. 

It was easy, too, in setting forth the conflicting claims 
of the ' New Company and the Old' to the monopoly of the 
manufacture and dying of woollens, for instance, to glance at 
the New Company and the Old whose claims to the monopoly 
of another public interest, not less important, were coming 
forward for adjustment just about that time, and urging their 



574 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

respective rights upon the attention of the chief men in the 
nation. 

Or in the discussion of a plan for reforming the king's 
household, and for reducing its wanton waste and extrava- 
gance — in exhibiting the detail of a plan for relieving the 
embarrassments of the palace just then, which, with the aid of 
the favourite and his friends, and their measures for relief, 
were fast urging on the revolution — it was easy to indicate 
a more extensive reform ; it was impossible to avoid a 
glance, in passing, at the pitifulness of the position of the 
man who held all men in awe and bondage then; it was 
impossible to avoid a touch of that same pen which 
writes elsewhere, 'Beggar and Madman,' too, so freely, — con- 
soling the Monarch with the suggestion that Essex was also 
greatly in debt at a time when he was much sought after 
and caressed, and instancing the case of other courtiers who 
had been in the same position, and yet contrived to hold 
their heads up. 

Under the easy artistic disguise of courtly rivalries and 
opposing ambitions — under cover, it might be, of an out- 
rageous personal mutual hostility — it was easy for public men 
belonging to the same side in politics, who were obliged to 
conduct, not only the business of the state, but their own 
private affairs, and to protect their own most sacred interests 
under such conditions, — it was easy for politicians trained in 
such a school, by the skilful use of such artifices, to play into 
each other's hands, and to attain ends which in open league 
they would have been sure to lose; to avert evils, it might be, 
which it would have been vain and fatal for those most con- 
cerned in them openly to resist. To give to a courtier seek- 
ing advancement, with certain ulterior aims always in view, 
the character of a speculator, a scholastic dreamer, unable for 
practice, unfit to be trusted with state affairs, was not, after 
all, however pointedly it might be complained of at the time, 
so fatal a blow as it would have been to direct attention, 
already sufficiently on the alert, to the remarkable practical 
gifts with which this same speculator happened, as we all 



conclusion. 575 

know, to be also endowed. This courtier's chief enemy, if he 
had been in his great rival's secrets, or if he had reflected at 
all, might have done him a worse turn than that. The hosti- 
lities of that time are no more to be taken on trust than its 
friendships, and the exaggerated expressions of them, — the 
over-doing sometimes points to another meaning. 

While indicating the legal method of proceeding in con- 
ducting the show of a trial, to which ' the man whose fame 
did indeed fold in the orb o , the world' was to be subjected — 
a trial in which the decision was known beforehand — ' though,' 
says our Poet — 

' Though well, we may not pass upon his life, 
Without the form ofjvstice ;' — 

it was easy for the mean, sycophantic, truckling tool of a 
Stuart — for the tool of a Stuart's favourite — to insert in such 
a paper, if not private articles, private readings of passages, 
interlinings, pointing to a history in that case which has not 
yet transpired; it was easy for such a one to do it, when the 
partner of his treasons would have had no chance to criticise 
his case, or meddle with it. 

In this collection of the apparently miscellaneous remains of 
our great philosopher, there are included many important state 
papers, and much authentic correspondence with the chief 
personages and actors of that age, which performed their part 
at the time as letters and state papers, though they were every 
one of them written with an inner reference to the position of 
the writer, and intended to be unfolded eventually with the 
key of that position. But along with this authentic historical 
matter, cunningly intermingled with it, much that is 'supposi- 
titious,' 1 to borrow a term which this writer found particularly to 
his purpose — supposititious in the same sense in which the 
speeches of Thucydides and those of his imitators are supposi- 
tious — is also introduced. There is a great deal of fictitious 
correspondence here, designed to eke out that view of this 
author's life and times which the authentic letters left un- 
finished, and which he was anxious, for certain reasons, to 



576 THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

transmit ^to posterity, — which he was forbidden to transmit 
in a more direct manner. There is a good deal of miscella- 
neous letter-writing here, and there will be found whole series 
of letters, in which the correspondence is sustained on both 
sides in a tolerably lively manner, by this Master of Arts; but 
under a very meagre dramatic cover in this case, designedly 
thin, never meant to serve as a cover with ' men of under- 
standing.' Read which side of the correspondence you will in 
these cases, ' here is his dry hand up and down.' 

These fictitious supposititious letters are written in his own 
name, as often as in another's; for of all the impersonations, 
ancient and modern, historical and poetic, which the imperso- 
nated genius of the modern arts had to borrow to speak and 
act his part in, there is no such mask, no so deep, thick-woven, 
impenetrable disguise, as that historical figure to which his own 
name and person is attached ; — the man whom the Tudor and 
the Stuart admitted to their secrets, — the man whom the Tudor 
tolerated, whom the Stuart delighted to honor. In his rules 
of policy, he has left us the most careful directions for the 
interpretations of the lives of men whose ' impediments' are 
such, and whose ' natures and ends ' are so f differing and 
dissonant from the general state of the times in which they 
live,' that it is necessary for them to avoid ' disclosing them- 
selves,' ' to be in the whole course of their lives close, retired, 
reserved, as we see in Tiberius, who was never seen at a play, 3 
men who are compelled, as it were, ' to act their lives as in a 
theatre.' ' The soundest disclosing, 1 he says, ' and expounding 
of men is by their natures and ends. The weaker sort 
of men are best interpreted by their natures, the wisest by 
their ends, 1 ' Princes are best interpreted by their natures, 
private persons by their ends, because princes being at the 
top of human desires, they have, for the most part, no 
particular ends whereto they aspire, by distance from which a 
man might take measure and scale of the rest of their 
actions and desires 1 ' Distance from which,' — that is the 
key for the interpretation of the lives of private persons of 
certain unusual endowments, who propound to themselves 



conclusion. 577 

under such conditions ' good and reasonable ends, and such as 
are within their power to attain.' As to the worthiness of 
these ends, we have some acquaintance with them already in 
our own experience. The great leaders of the new movements 
which make the modern ages — the discoverers of its science of 
sciences, the inventors of its art of arts, found themselves in 
an enemy's camp, and the policy of war was the only means 
by which they could preserve and transmit to us the benefits 
we have already received at their hands, — the benefits we 
have yet to receive from them. The story of this Interpreter 
is sent down to us, not by accident, but by his own design. 
But it is sent down to us with the works in which the nobility 
of his nature is all laid open, — in which the end of his ends 
is constantly declared, and constantly pursued, — it is sent 
down to us along with the works in which his ends are accom- 
plished^ to the times that have found in their experience what 
they were. He did not think it too much to ask of ages ex- 
perimentally acquainted with the virtue of the aims for which 
he made these sacrifices, — aims which he constantly pro- 
pounded as the end of his large activity, to note the ' dis- 
sonance' between that life which the surface of these documents 
exhibits, — between that historic form, too, which the surface 
of that time's history exhibits, — and the nature which is re- 
vealed in this life-act, — the soul, the never-shaken soul of 
this proceeding. 

' The god of soldiers, 
With the consent of supreme Jove, inform 
Thy thoughts with nobleness ; that thou may'st prove 
The shame unvulnerable, and stick i' the war 
Like a great sea-mark, standing every flaw, 
And saving those that eye thee? 

' I would not, as I often hear dead men spoken of, that men 
should say of me, he judged, and lived so and so; I knew him 
better than any. Now, as much as decency permits, I here 
discover my inclinations and affections. If any observe, he will 
find that I have either told, or designed to tell all. What I 
cannot speak, I point out with my finger.' ( There was never 

P P 



57^ THE CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL. 

greater circumspection and military prudence than is some- 
times seen among US [' Naturalists']. Can it be that men are 
afraid to lose themselves by the way, that they reserve them- 
selves to the end of the game?' 

' I mortally hate to be mistaken by those who happen to 
come across my name. He that does all things for honor and 
glory, what can he think to gain by showing himself to the 
world in a mask, and by concealing his true being from the 
people? If you are a coward, and men commend you for 
your valour, is it of you that they speak ? They take you for 
another. Archelaus, king of Macedon, walking along the 
street, somebody threw water on his head, which they who 
were with him said he ought to punish: 'Ay, but J said the 
other, ' he did not throw the water upon me, but upon him 
whom he took me to be.' Socrates being told by the people, 
that people spoke ill of him, ' Not at all,' said he ; * there is 
nothing in me of what they say. / am content to be less 
commended, provided I am better known. I may be reputed 
a wise man, in such a sort of wisdom as I take to be folly.' 
— [' The French Interpreter. i- ] 

This is the man who never in all his life came into the 
theatre, content to work behind the scenes, scientifically 
enlightened as to the true ends of living, and the means of at- 
taining those ends, propounding deliberately his duty as a man, 
his duty to his kind, his obedience to the law of his higher 
nature, as his predominant end, — but not to the harm or 
oppression of his particular and private nature, but to its 
most felicitous conservation and advancement, — at large in its 
new Epicurean emancipations, rejoicing in its great fruition, 
happy in its untiring activities, triumphing over all impedi- 
ments, celebrating in secret lyrics, its immortal triumphs over 
'death and all oblivious enmity,' and finding, 'in the conscious- 
ness of good intentions, a more continual joy to nature than all 
the provision that can be made for security and repose,' — not 
reconciled to the part he was compelled to play in his own 
time, — his fine, keen sensibilities perpetually at war with 
it, — always balancing and reviewing the nice ethical qucs- 



conclusion. 579 

tions it involved, and seeking always the e nobler ' solution. 
' The one part have I suffered, the other will I do/ — demon- 
strating the possibility of making, even under such conditions, 
a ' life sublime/ 

' All places that the eye of heaven visits 
Are, to a wise man, ports and happy havens.' 

There is no room here for details; but this is the account of 
this so irreconcileable difference between the Man of these 
Works and the Man in the Mask, in which he triumphantly 
achieved them ; — this is the account, in the general, which 
will be found to be, upon investigation, the true one. And 
the more the subject is studied, even by the light which this 
work brings to bear upon it, the more the truth of this state- 
ment will become apparent. 

But though the details are, by the limits of this volume, 
excluded here, it cannot well close, without one word as to the 
points in this part of the evidence, which have made the 
deepest impression on us. 

No man suffered death, or mutilation, or torture, or out- 
rage of any kind, under the two tyrannies of this age of 
learning, that it was possible for this scientific propounder of 
the law of human kind-ness to avert and protect him from — 
this anticipator and propounder of a human civilization. He 
was far in advance of our times in his criticism of the bar- 
barisms which the rudest ages of social experiment have 
transmitted to us. He could not tread upon a beetle, without 
feeling through all that exquisite organization which was great" 
nature's gift to her Interpreter in chief, great nature's pang. 
To anticipate the sovereign's wishes, seeking to divert them 
first ' with a merry conceit' perhaps; for, so light as that were, 
the motives on which swcA^consequences might depend then — 
to forestall the inevitable decision was to arm himself with the 
powers he needed. The men who were protected and 
relieved by that secret combination against tyranny, which 
required, as the first condition of its existence, that its chiefs 
should occupy places of trust and authority, ought to come 



580 THE CURE OP THE COMMON-WEAL. 

out of their graves to testify against the calumnies that blast 
our modern learning, and the virtue — the virtue of it, at its 
source. Does any one think that a universal slavery could be 
fastened on the inhabitants of this island, when wit and man- 
liness are at their height here, without so much as the project 
of an ' under-ground rail-way' being suggested for the relief of 
its victims? ' I will seek him and privily relieve him. Go 
you and maintain talk with the Duke that my charity be not of 
him perceived. If he ask for me, I am ill and gone to bed. 
Go to; say you nothing. There is division between the 
Dukes — [between the Dukes] — and a worse matter than 
that. I have received a letter this night. It is dangerous to 
be spoken. I have locked the letter in my closet. There is part 
of a power already footed. We must incline to the King. 
If I die for it, as no less is threatened me, the king, my old 
master, must be relieved.' That when all is done will be found 
to contain some hints as to the manner in which ' charities' 
of this kind have need to be managed, under a government 
armed with powers so indefinable. 

Cassius. And let us swear our resolution. 

Brutus. No, not an oath : If not the face of men, 

The sufferance of our souls, the times abuse, — 
If these be motives weak, break off betimes, 
And every man hence to his idle bed ; 
So let high-sighted tyranny range on, 
Till each man drop by lottery. But if these, — 
As I am sure they do, — bear fire enough 
To kindle cowards, and to steel with valour 
The melting spirits of women, then, countrymen, 
What need we any spur but our own cause 
To prick us to redress 1 what other bond 
Than secret Romans, that have spoken the word, 

And will not palter 

Swear priests and cowards, and men cautelous, 
Old feeble carrions, and such suffering souls 
That welcome wrongs ; unto bad causes swear 
Such creatures as men doubt ; but do not stain 
The even virtue of our enterprise, 
Nor the insuppressive mettle of our spirits, 
To think that, or our cause, or our performance, 
Did need an oath.' 

[Doctrine of the ' secret Romans'] 



CONCLUSION. 581 

As to the rest, it was this man — this man of a scientific 
* prudence' with the abhorrence of change, which is the instinct 
of the larger whole, confirmed by a scientific forethought — it 
was this man who gave at last the signal for change; not for 
war. 'Proceed by process' was his word. Constitutional 
remedies for the evils which appeared to have attained at last 
the unendurable point, were the remedies which he proposed — 
this was the move which he was willing, for his part, to 
initiate. — 'We are not, perhaps, at the last gasp. 1 think I 
see ways to save us.' — The proceedings of the Parliament 
which condemned him were studiously arranged beforehand 
by himself, — he wrote the programme of it, and the part he 
undertook to perform in it was the greatest in history.* 

It was as a baffled, disgraced statesman, that he found leisure 
to complete and put in final order for posterity, those noble 
works, through which we have already learned to love and 
honour him, in the face of this calumny. It was as a dis- 
graced and baffled statesman and courtier — all lurking 
jealousies and suspicions at last put to rest — all possibility of a 
political future precluded; but as a courtier still hanging on 
the king and on the power that controlled the king, for life 
and liberty, and careful still not to assert any independence 
of those same ends, which had always been taken to be his 
ends; it was in this character that he brought out at last the 
Novum Organum ; it was in this character that he ventured 
to collect and republish his avowed philosophical works; it 
was in this character too that he ventured at last to produce 
that little piece of history which comes down to us loosely 
appended to these philosophical writings. A history of the 
Second Conquest of the Children of Alfred, a Conquest which 
they resisted, in heroic wars, but vainly, for want of leaders 
and organization — overborne by the genius of a military chief 

* "T is the indiligent .reader that loses my suhject, not I,' says the 
' foreign interpreter' of this style of writing. ' There will always be 
found some word or other, in a corner, though it lie very close.' That 
is the rule for the reading of the e-sidence in this case. The word is 
there, though it lies very dose, as it had need to, to be available. 



582 THE CURE OF THE COMMON- WEAL. 

whom this historian compares in king-craft with his cotempo- 
raries Ferdinand of Spain, and Louis XI. It is a history which 
was dedicated to Charles I., which was corrected in the manu- 
script by James I., at the request of the author; and he owed to 
that monarch's approval of it, permission to come to town for 
the purpose of superintending its publication. It is the History 
of the Founding of the Tudor Dynasty: prepared, — as were the 
rest of these works, — under the patronage of an insolent favou- 
rite with whom it was necessary ' entirely to drop the character 
that carried with it the least show of truth or gracefulness' 
and under the patronage of a monarch with whom it was not 
sufficient ' for persons of superior gifts and endowments to act 
the deformity of obsequiousness, unless they really changed 
themselves and became abject and contemptible in their 
persons.' 

' / am in this ( Volumnia) 
Your wife, your son, these senators, the nobles, 
And you will rather show our general lowts, 
How you can frown, than spend a fawn upon them, 
For the inheritance of their loves, and safeguard, 
Of what that want might ruin. 

Away my disposition ! 

When you do find him, or alive or dead, 
He will be found like Brutus, like himself. 

' Yet country-men, yet, hold up your heads. 
I will proclaim my name about the field. 
I am the son of Marcus Cato, ho ! 
A foe to tyrants, and my country's friend. 

1 And I am Brutus, Marcus Brutus J, 
Brutus, my country's friend, know me for Brutus.' 



FINIS. 



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